


The Cure

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [26]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 03:37:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 22,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15476820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: The Animorphs are stranded on an alien planet, fighting an unbeatable enemy, and Jake is dead.It's about to get worse.The Animorphs are about to learn things about Iskoort that will make them wonder just what Jake gave his life for, make them wonder if the planet is even worth saving. But it's too late to back out; it's them against the Howlers, and the Animorphs no longer have a leader. Can they pull together in time to survive? Can they find some way to defeat their enemies and avenge Jake? If they can't, more than Iskoort and the Animorphs are at stake. If they can't, who's going to protect Earth?Thanks to Redtailedhawk90 and Justanotherghostwriter for their excellent beta work





	1. Chapter 1

 

I sat with my back against a metal wall. On the other side, an industrial fan turned very slowly. Something wasn’t aligned right; it squealed for part of its rotation and shuddered for the rest. The rhythm thundered through my spine, crept over my skull, and turned into a chant in my mind, mocking me.

_YOUgotjakekilledYOUgotjakekilledYOUgotjakekilled…_

“You killed him!” Rachel yelled, punching Marco in the chest. There were tears in her eyes; something I didn’t see very often. “Let all the howlers in?! What kind of a plan was that?!”

“If we had waited any longer, we would’ve been trapped in that room until we suffocated, starved, or died of thirst,” Marco said calmly. “I think that gas was as toxic to iskoort as it was to us. They weren’t endangering any iskoort by pumping it, but the moment it reached toxic levels, we would’ve been unable to leave the room, or we’d be gassing iskoort. That was the howlers’ plan.”

“You think, you _think_ ,” Rachel spat. “You have no idea if that was toxic to iskoort. You killed Jake on a gamble.”

“Ah, yes, I should have waited until we were dead to plan anything,” Marco said. “The escape was going well. What got Jake killed was you forcing us into an attack when we should have been leading those two howlers off so that everyone could retreat safely.”

Rachel’s face twisted into a snarl.

“I got Jake killed,” I said, leaning back against the wall and closing my eyes. “He charged to save me, because I was dumb enough to attack a howler as a squirrel. If I hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have gone over the edge.”

“That’s right!” David snapped. “Your idiotic – ”

“Don’t you dare talk to her like that!” Rachel snarled. “What was your useless butt doing while she was jumping in to save our lives, you little – ”

“Jake died because he agreed to come to a planet he had no responsibility for to fight the shock troops of an unbeatable genocidal maniac,” Erek said. “Nothing anybody here did after that decision had any influence on this, except possibly the timing. Frankly I’m amazed that we all lasted this long.”

<This is your fault,> Tobias told him.

“Yes. I believe I explained that yesterday.”

<I don’t mean your weird self-indulgent pity party with the Cosmic Jerk. I mean, you could’ve saved him if you’d shown up thirty seconds earlier. You bailed the rest of us out there. Why not him? Was it really that difficult for someone like you to get away from a bunch of iskoort and a handful of howlers?>

“Yes. It was.”

<What, you’ve suddenly stopped being able to tear your way through the walls?>

Erek crossed his arms. “And how many people would you have me collapse a building on top of? Even you couldn’t have done it, with my strength. The place was full of servant iskoort.”

“You could have done it,” Marco said. “You could have done it before any of this became a problem. You could have killed those howlers on sight, incinerated them or electrocuted them or torn them apart or whatever.”

“You know he isn’t capable of that,” I said, not opening my eyes.

“He was!” Marco snapped. “He chose not to be! He could’ve eliminated the yeerks. Eliminated the howlers. He could’ve… he wouldn’t even have to be that violent, really; just holding open the option to use any force at all would’ve saved so many lives. He’d rather pay in other people’s blood so that he can feel all pure and hold onto a dead fantasy land.”

“That’s my point, Marco,” I said. “He isn’t capable of that. I don’t mean the violence, now. I mean he isn’t capable of making the choice you think he should have made. Chee _aren’t human_. They’re faking. You and me, we’re a warrior species. A proper warrior species, not like andalites or yeerks, who just have a warrior culture. We have millions of years of evolution behind us, millions of years of tribalism; friendship and loyalty and war and violence, all on high power, all in the same organism. We live in the grey areas. We always have. We’re equipped for it. Erek’s people were created on a peaceful planet to hang out and have fun, and you expect him to have the same moral capacities as us? Being mad at Erek for not being able to make that choice and navigate moral minefields for the rest of his however-many-millennia of life is like being mad at one of us for not being able calculate complicated algorithms in milliseconds like he can. You’re wasting your energy.”

“Maybe...” David began hesitantly, “maybe Jake’s not dead? Maybe he just, uh, fell out of thought-speak range or whatever, and morphed into a bird and – ”

“Are you stupid?” Rachel asked. “You felt that, same as us. You know what it was.”

“Leave him alone, Rachel,” I sighed. “He wasn’t with Elfangor. It’s his first time. He’s just a kid.”

“I’m older than you!” David snapped.

I tuned out the conversation, focusing on the hypnotic rhythm of the fan. (I got Jake killed. I got Jake killed.) We were in a temporarily abandoned factory. Before leaving on some mysterious errand of his own, Guide had explained that the Worker Guild refused to go back to work in the factory until the Superstition and Magic Guild could verify that the building was free of any malevolent spirits of fictional creatures. There was some sort of issue with price negotiation based on how real these particular spirits (which were agreed to be at least partially real) were, because the Storyteller’s Guild might be liable to pay some of the fee.

Normally, I probably would have asked a lot of questions about that. But I didn’t feel like asking questions right then. I didn’t feel anything right then, except the sick sensation that Jake’s death had left in my mind.

I didn’t want to feel anything else. It was like when you wear a watch for awhile and then take it off, but you can still feel the watch until you rub your wrist and replace the sensation with another. I didn’t want to replace the feeling. I didn’t want to replace all I had left of Jake.

The other Animorphs kept bickering about something unimportant. (I got Jake killed.) Eventually, the sounds started to annoy me, so I got up and left the room.

The factory was less garish than the other parts of Iskoort we’d seen. It was painted a uniform blue, which had rubbed off in some places to reveal metal underneath. I couldn’t guess at what all the odd-looking machines scattered about the place did.

Ax was in the hallway. He wasn’t doing anything. He was just standing there. He wasn’t even keeping guard; his stalk eyes, usually scanning any environment he found himself in by habit, were pointed straight ahead, staring at nothing.

He heard me approach, though, and faced one eye towards me.

“So this is a revenge mission now, right?” I asked him.

<After my behaviour in our first fight with these creatures, I possess no right to claim revenge for Prince Jake. It would be highly dishonorable for me to try.> He raised his tailblade. <That said, if I get the chance… I suppose there are some things more important than honor.>

“Something I never thought I’d hear an andalite say,” I said. “But yeah, let’s kill these bastards.”

<Something I never thought I would hear you say,> Ax countered.

“The others are arguing about pointless things,” I said.

<This is why this team needs a clearer chain of command. Who is in charge now?>

I shrugged. David was new, I didn’t want to do it, Erek wasn’t an Animorph, and Ax would certainly refuse. “Tobias, Marco or Rachel, I guess,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll figure it out eventually.”

<Before we are all killed by howlers, I hope. I wave been reviewing the howler data that Tobias purchased as thoroughly as I can.>

“And?”

<Tobias was correct. There are no defeats. The impression I get from the data is that there has never been a howler defeat. And… they do not do anything but kill. They move to a planet and kill and kill and kill until there is nothing left to kill. Then they move on to a different planet. Their most peaceful actions amount to some trading for items to help them kill, and this only happens if it is faster than killing the traders and taking their weapons.>

Even the yeerks had interests beyond just enslavement.

“That’s unsettling,” I said. “But, well… this is a fight to the death anyway.” Ellimist had been pretty clear about that – the winner was whichever team had somebody left alive. So far, it was a draw – both sides down by one. But in actual combat terms, it had taken all eight of us to fight one of them to a draw, so being down a soldier (I stepped down on the pain lancing through my heart) was a far more serious problem for us.

I wondered if the other howlers had felt their comrade die, crushed on the planet surface somewhere far below. They must have – they had collective memories, right? Did it bother them, feeling their comrade’s pain? Did they understand that each of them would someday die? Did they care?

“We need to make a plan to avenge Jake,” I said.

<Yes. We should consult with the others.>

“And Ax? I know what you’re thinking. But don’t get yourself killed over this.”

<What do you mean?>

“I know you. I know you’re likely to charge into some glorious last battle to avenge your fallen Prince and get heroically cut down in honorable combat. I’m telling you, that’s not what Jake would have wanted.”

<I suppose that now, we can never be sure what Prince Jake would have wanted,> Ax said coldly.

“Well, it’s not what I want. Know why? Because we have to kill seven of these bastards, and you were the first one of us to even injure one. You’re an asset. I don’t know how many of us are going to get out of this, but if we’re buying howler deaths with our own, we want a good exchange rate. Fight smart so that you can take down as many as you can.”

Ax didn’t promise anything. But he didn’t disagree either. Instead, he looked towards the door separating us from the others.

<We should get to work,> he said.


	2. Chapter 2

  

“So tell me what to do,” Rachel was pleading with Marco as we entered.

“What makes you think I know what to do?” Marco asked.

“Because you always do! This is what you do! Look, I can fight. Okay? Tell me to, and I’ll go elephant or grizzly and charge out there right now, looking for howlers. But I can’t beat them, Marco. I can’t. And now, with… with Jake…” She dragged a forearm over her eyes. “You can do this. You proved on that base off Royan Island that you can do this. So step up, and tell me what happens next in our plan to kill the things that killed my cousin.”

“Hang on, why is Marco in charge?” David asked.

<Not the time, David,> Tobias said.

“Are you kidding? This is exactly the time. Jake’s dead! We need a new leader! You guys are all just going to let this guy step in without a… a vote or something?”

Tobias and Marco each glanced at me. Right – this was my job, wasn’t it? I was supposed to be the ‘people person’. If I let this go to a vote, we’d argue for five more minutes, then David would be outvoted and decide the team was ganging up on him. I didn’t want to get involved. I really didn’t.

But we had howlers to take down. And to do that, we needed a functional team.

“Nobody’s putting Marco in charge,” I said. “Rachel’s just asking for a plan. Marco’s great at clever, cautious plans. But your dad was a spy, right? I’ve seen you break us into things, figure out things we couldn’t figure out… you saved Jenny’s life.” A little ego stroking rarely hurt. “So you need to be thinking on a plan, too. We all should. Together, we can come up with something we can use.”

<I’m not sure we should be together,> Tobias said. <We’re too easy to find this way. We should split up, go to ground.>

“We can barely fight one or two of them to a draw,” Rachel pointed out. “If we split up, they’ll kill us all off one by one. Our only hope of victory is to split _them_ up and find something to give us that bit of extra firepower.”

“Ellimist has to think we can win,” David said. “He still wants to save this planet, right? So we have to be expected to win, right?”

“We’ll win,” I said. “That’s a foregone conclusion. Survival is the hard part.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’ll win’?” Erek asked.

I glanced at him sidelong. “How long does a howler live?”

“I have no idea.”

“Longer or shorter lifespan than a chee, do you think?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ellimist told you that you had the tools to win. It wasn’t lying. When you run out of Animorphs, do what chee do. Hide. Watch. Wait for them to die out. You can use the skill you’ve been practicing for thousands of years, and you can save an entire planet with it. That’s basically what you wanted, right?” I sounded a lot harsher than I meant to. I didn’t care.

“And if Erek dies?” Rachel asked.

“He should try hard not to. If we want the best possible chance of victory, he should abandon us all to our fates right now.”

“I think you all know there’s no way I’m going to do that,” Erek said. “You’d be wasting your time to try to convince me.”

“I won’t try to convince you, because apparently I’m the only person not treating this as a suicide mission,” Marco said. “But Rachel has a point. Howlers can kill chee. They’ve done it.”

“Ax,” I said, “is there any reason that we couldn’t morph plants?”

<That would be suicide,> he said. <It should be physically possible, but without a basic nerve anchor for your consciousness, you would be mindless.>

“But still, technically, alive.”

<I suppose so, although you would not experience it.>

“Then if Erek dies, we find the longest-lived plant we can on Iskoort, and someone digs a hole in a garden somewhere, morphs, and waits two hours. Same strategy, really.”

“Let’s call that an absolute last resort,” Rachel said. “I’d rather do this the more proactive way.”

“I wasn’t suggesting we just give up. I was saying that Iskoort isn’t at stake. This planet is safe so long as we don’t all do something unbelievably stupid. This is about survival. This is about avenging Jake.”

<We have experience at survival,> Tobias said.

“Okay,” Marco said. “Assets. They used the iskoort against us. We can do the same.”

“How?” Rachel asked. “Using them as shields has been useful, but as the gas thing showed, it’s kind of a double-edged sword.”

“I was thinking we be a bit more active than that.”

<How?> Tobias asked.

“As soon as Guide gets back, we need to ask him how to contact the Warmaker’s Guild.”


	3. Chapter 3

Warmakers didn’t like off-worlders, but they did like being paid. Guide simply sent a messenger to their headquarters putting an absurd bounty on howler heads. He spread the word among the traders, too. They weren’t likely to do anything violent, but they might create a demand among other parties.

“That should keep them busy,” Marco said. “I don’t think the warmakers will succeed, but they’ll be a distraction.”

<There’s a chance that the howlers might figure out what we’ve done and try the same trick,> Tobias said.

“But we can hide better than they can,” Marco said.

“And fake our deaths,” I added. “If they want bits of us as proof, then our organs become more valuable. These guys are already trying to buy our organs, and we can heal. If they do that, our organs just become more valuable, don’t they? We increase our buying power.”

<And make the bounty worthless when they figure out that our deaths are basically impossible to prove!> Tobias added. <Until they figure that out, we can use it to fake our deaths! This might actually work for us!>

“Okay,” Marco said, “what else do we have?”

“The howlers may have bioweapons by now,” Erek said, “depending on what they can source from the iskoort. They knew enough to use toxins last time.”

“Speaking of which, how did they figure that out?” David asked.

“They probably took your blood from your first battle,” Erek said. “That would have told them what gases would suffocate you. I’m not sure about the nerve poisons. They may be general poisons, intended to stop you from breaking out of the room and avoiding suffocation by forcing you to endanger iskoort to do so, if Marco was correct.”

“We can… probably avoid bioweapons,” I said. “We have iskoort morphs, and they can’t use anything that’ll kill the iskoort… but it’d mean staying in iskoort morph as much as we possibly could.”

“And they are not combat morphs,” Rachel said. “If it comes to that, we should get warmaker morphs. Might even get a few hits in before the howlers realise they can hurt us.”

“Our only chance is surprise,” David said. “They keep finding us, catching us off-guard. Every time we fight, it’s because they tracked us down. _We_ need to fight _them_ when they’re not ready for us.”

“Did you see them? They’re always ready for war,” Marco said.

“Not always,” I said thoughtfully. “They’re living beings. They need to eat. They probably need to sleep. Do we know anything about that?”

<From the memories Tobias purchased,> Ax said, <I think that they have a cycle of two Earth hours’ sleep per fifty Earth hour cycle. I cannot be certain without more data.>

“And they eat?” David asked.

<High-energy food of many kinds. Meat, mostly.> Ax looked revolted. <They will eat their enemies.>

“Eww,” Rachel said. “I thought we left that behind on Earth with Visser Three.”

“So Crayak made a race to wipe out everyone else, and then made them meat eaters?” I asked. “How exactly are they expected to survive when they’re the universe’s perfect race and there’s nothing left to eat?”

<Can we starve them?> Tobias asked. <You want to kill a predator, you take away its food source.>

<This is a planet accustomed to tourists,> Ax said. <I am sure that the howlers can purchase what they need.>

“Can we poison them?” I asked. “They tried to poison us. Maybe Iskoort has really great bioengineers or something. They’d have to, right? Just to be able to feed tourists from all over, with different biologies.”

“How do you plan to poison them?” Rachel asked. “Walk up to one and force-feed it?”

“Their bite!” Erek said, grinning. “If they can get close enough, they bite.”

“Oh, right, yeah. I remember.” Rachel grimaced. “I had practically no chest left after that fight. And a grizzly has a lot of chest.”

“Guide,” Marco said, turning to the iskoort who was sitting in the corner, openly watching our conversation. (Creating memories for sale, I assumed. A dramatic setup to precede a grand fight.) “Can you iskoort make some kind of poison that would work on howlers but not us, that we could inject ourselves with before battle?”

“Is this the grossest mission the Animorphs have ever done?” David asked.

<Not even close,> Tobias said. <This one time Cassie tried to get us to turn into these weird burrowing skin parasites that – >

“Hey, I was happy to compromise with ticks!” I said. “And that wasn’t nearly as awful as the ants in the end, was it?”

<It is possible that the Bioengineers’ Guild may be able to create such a thing,> Guide said, answering Marco’s question. <I am not thoroughly familiar with their ethical codes. The effectiveness could be limited.>

“Anything that could slow them down at all would be a big help,” Rachel said.

“What would they need to get started?” Marco asked. “And how long would it take?”

<I cannot be certain. I suspect… they would need biological samples of what you wish to target, and what you specifically wish to be immune, as it is unlikely that either your biology or that of the howlers is in their files.>

“We’re easy,” I said. “But howlers? We need to get a biological sample from the howlers?”

“Nothing for it.” Rachel stood up. “We need to force a fight.”


	4. Chapter 4

It was weird, planning a fight without Jake.

The goal was simple – we didn’t need to kill howlers. We just needed as much biological material from a howler as possible.

It came down to choosing between three plans.

One: try to track down the howlers, force a fight, and cut off a limb or something. Straightforward, but absurdly dangerous.

Two: send Guide to find and negotiate with the howlers, claiming willingness to betray us. He’d demand howler body parts in exchange for proof of our deaths, which we would need to find a way to falsify using morphing. This was far safer, but unlikely to work – the howlers couldn’t regenerate, so they probably wouldn’t be too cavalier about trading away bits of themselves. Besides, we didn’t want to tip the howlers off about using the iskoort to fight with; the longer it took them to figure it out, the better.

Three: go down to the ground where Jake had fallen, and try to find some howler pulp down there. This sounded like a good idea at first, until Tobias pointed out that even if anything was down there that wasn’t already rotting, some iskoort or other would have already picked it up.

We decided to enact plan one. Absurdly dangerous, but at least it had a chance of working. We needed a way to track down or attract one howler, to cut something off, and to get out of there safely. Ax and Rachel both wanted to be on the front line, to dash in and get what we needed. We decided to send both of them; they each wouldn’t let the other get killed.

<Remember,> Tobias said for the millionth time as we got into position in a mostly-empty energy storage area, <our goal is to get an arm or something and go. Not to fight to the death.>

<We know, we know,> Rachel grumbled. She was a hork-bajir for this mission; Ax, of course, kept his normal tailblade. Tobias and David, both red-tailed hawks, sat ready for their part, and Marco and I… we were the secret weapon.

<How likely is this retreat plan to work?> David asked for the millionth time.

<Ax thinks it should, from the data Tobias bought,> Marco said. <But we won’t know until we try.>

<Oh. One of those missions.>

<Aren’t most of our missions those missions?> Tobias asked.

<That’s what’s starting to worry me.>

Nearby sat Guide. We had tried to make him go away, but there was no way to convince him not to witness the plan’s thrilling conclusion and make a nice, complete memory for sale. He didn’t listen to any protests about the danger, of course; he’d seen that he wasn’t in any danger. The howlers couldn’t hurt him.

To be fair, we hadn’t tried to convince him very hard. We didn’t have Erek, who was off planning a public holographic Animorphs appearance several levels away. It was nice to have an untouchable shield nearby, in case things went wrong.

The howlers, we had learned from questioning iskoort, tended to move about in pairs, rather than as a group. Now that there were seven, one was alone on our level. The others were scattered about on higher levels, and would (we hoped) converge on Erek’s location soon enough. We just had to intercept our lone howler, distract him.

With their collective memories, there was a chance the others would realise what had happened fairly soon. So the battle would have to be quick.

<Ax? Time?> Marco asked.

<Erek has been running his distraction for two of your Earth minutes,> was the response.

<We’re not even on Earth right now, but good enough. Tobias?>

<On it.> Tobias took to the air. It shouldn’t take long for him to find our howler and lead him back.

It took less than a minute. <Incoming!> Tobias yelled, swooping past, a howler barely four feet behind him.

The area we were in was full of large chrome cylinders, each about four feet wide and equally high, humming faintly. It gave us plenty of sound and vision cover. The hork-bajir and andalite that charged the howler from the sides took it by surprise, but it managed to drop under Ax’s whipping tailblade, roll, and land on its feet. It remembered, from its teammate, what it was like to fight an andalite.

None of them had fought a hork-bajir. That gave Rachel a slight advantage, but not much; the howler was faster than she was, with better senses. Guide whined in delight as the two slashed at each other. Rachel would have been down in moments if part of the howler’s attention wasn’t taken up avoiding Ax.

I wanted to yell at them to hurry up. We already knew we weren’t a match for these things! There was no time to play around!

The hum of the big cylinders around me was getting pretty loud. No… no, there was another sound. Running feet. Lots of them.

That was when the warmaker iskoort showed up.

It seemed they’d followed the howler. They leapt for him, grabbing arms and legs. He was slowed – perfect! But they had no great love of us either; Marco and I were almost trodden on, and David and Tobias had to lift us out of the fray. Tobias struggled to rise, dragging Marco’s back legs along the floor.

They had it! A howler arm! Rachel held it aloft, triumphantly. Time to clear the area before the other howlers showed up.

Marco and I were dropped near the fight. We weren’t the fastest of animals. We weren’t all that dangerous, or agile. This was no leopard to bite at an enemy, no squirrel to scrabble at his face. We were something better than that.

We were skunks.

I hit the ground, spun and raised my tail immediately. Three quick sprays, right at the howler; three more, in the general area. Then a dash between feet; a dash for cover.

Howlers have amazing senses. One of those is a great sense of smell. It had been a bit of a gamble on whether they’d find skunk musk as disgusting as Earth animals did or not. Turns out, yes, they did.

The howler made a keening sound I’d never heard before, and bolted. Ax thundered past, desperate to get out of the area. Rachel was bent over her prize, free hand pressed tight to her face. Hork-bajir, unfortunately, also have a great sense of smell. I grabbed onto one of her leg blades as she passed, picking myself up from under the press of warmaker feet.

The skunk musk did not make the iskoort leave the area, like I’d thought it would. The smell of skunk musk drove the iskoort mad.

Warmakers were screaming, roaring, with their accordion diaphragms, punching and kicking and butting not just us, but each other, even inanimate objects. Were they going to hurt each other? Could they do that? If this was going to be the result, shouldn’t the universe have prevented us from spraying? I held on while Rachel ran. We had the arm; now we just had to leave. We had to leave as quickly as we could.

“Aargh!” Rachel yelled, more annoyed than hurt. “Leave me alone, you dumb little – stop it! You’re not going to hurt me by biting a blade!” She’d turned to shake off an iskoort.

<Friends!> Guide said, rushing up to us. <We must leave! I you die here I will not be able to harvest your – >

Then he stopped talking. I could see why.

Guide, confident that nothing we did could hurt him, had strode straight up to us, where one of the crazed warmakers had headbutted him. The butt was probably little more than painful, even to a trader iskoort. But it did knock him forward. Forward towards Rachel, who had her back to him, howler arm gripped under hers. Forward into the disembodied howler arm.

Right onto those unbelievably sharp howler hand blades.

The blades sliced neatly through his long, birdlike neck, sending his head tumbling to the floor. Rachel spun, warmaker iskoort miraculously dodging the swinging howler arm.

<What…?> she said dumbly. <How…?>

<Time to go!> David said, circling above.

<But,> I said, <it should be impossible. He… he shouldn’t...>

<Yeah, well, these warmakers are starting to clear out and if we don’t move we’re gonna be a bunch of foreigners standing around the decapitated corpse of a local, so unless you wanna be arrested by someone we’re physically incapable of fighting while we’re being hunted by howlers...>

He had a point. Rachel scooped me and Marco up and started to weave through the dwindling crowd as fast as she could, juggling two skunks and a severed arm. It felt wrong to just… leave Guide there, after everything he’d done for us. His head had been kicked about a bit and lay some distance ahead of us, his dead eyes pointing in our vague direction. His head was moving! No… something else was moving. Something was crawling out of Guide’s ear.

Something very familiar. A big, gooey slug.

“TSEEER!” Tobias dove for it, claws grasping, ready to kill. He missed, talons dragging on the metal floor briefly at the bottom of his swoop. Tobias? Miss a slow-moving target like that?

Rachel had seen it, too. <Yeerk!> She ran over and leapt, bringing her big feet down to crush it. Somehow, she missed, too.

<It won’t work,> I said, realising. <We can’t hurt the locals.>

<The locals?!> Rachel raged. <What’s wrong with you?! That’s not an iskoort, it’s a – >

<It’s Guide,> I said. <He’s been helping us. And… he can’t be alone here. Yeerks need pools to survive. They can’t travel too far from other yeerks.>

We stared around at the crowd around us. The warmaker iskoort were mostly gone, only to be replaced by servant iskoort, who didn’t seem bothered by the skunk smell at all. They hurried over to pick up Guide’s body… Guide’s host, I supposed… without much distress. One rushed over with a clay jar and gently picked up the yeerk.

Ax’s tailblade was immediately at his throat. <What are you going to do with that?>

<Do not worry, off-worlder,> the servant said, diaphragm humming soothingly. <He will not be harmed. I am taking him to the Yoort Pool to rest.>

<Yeerks!> Ax said, enraged. <It’s a whole planet of yeerks!>


	5. Chapter 5

Ax couldn’t hurt the servant iskoort, of course. But the iskoort didn’t know that. He trembled under Ax’s blade.

I started to demorph. This wasn’t a situation in which a skunk would be useful.

<Talk,> Rachel said.

<What do you want from me, visitors?> the servant asked.

<That’s a yeerk, there, in your jar. Are you a yeerk? This is a yeerk-controlled planet, isn’t it?>

<How did you get out this far without the andalites noticing?> Marco asked.

<This… this is just a trader’s yoort, my off-world friends,> the servant said nervously. <This is not far at all from his pool. I am not sure what an andalite is, or why one would take notice of a servant like me, but...>

“What’s going on?” Erek asked, coming up behind us. “Shouldn’t we be moving a little farther away from the battle site?” He looked at Ax’s blade. “Why are we threatening a servant?”

“Guide is dead,” I said with my just-formed human mouth.

<No, Guide’s host is dead,> Marco said. <Guide is in that jar. He’s a yeerk, Erek. They’re all yeerks.>

<We are iskoort,> the servant said, sounding confused.

Erek looked from the servant to the jar in his hands. Then he nodded. “Right. That makes sense.”

<You don’t sound surprised,> Rachel said. <Did you know about this?>

“I didn’t know. But I’m not surprised. It explains the Kandrona emitters down below us.”

<The what now?> Tobias asked, sounding uncharacteristically angry. <You didn’t think to mention this?!>

“We’re surrounded by weird machines and I don’t know why most of them are here,” Erek said. “Do you want a list?”

<A Kandrona emitter is a pretty big deal, Erek!> Tobias yelled.

<This is not the ideal place for this conversation,> Ax said. <We should leave this area, in case the howlers return.>

“Ax?” I said. “Guide helped us. Can that servant be allowed to get him somewhere safe? There’s a whole planet of iskoort to interrogate.”

Ax didn’t look like he wanted to lower his tail. But he did. <What about his host?> he asked me. <How do you think his host felt about any of this?>

I didn’t have an answer, of course.

The servant rushed off as fast as he could the instant Ax let him.

After a moment to gather our bearings, so did we. After all, we were trapped on a planet of yeerks, risking our lives to save yeerks. And if we wanted to get home and defend our own planet, we had to live long enough to save them.


	6. Chapter 6

We delivered the arm to the Bioengineer’s Guild. Guide had explained our needs and paid in advance, so we didn’t have any trouble. We stuck around to donate some of our own tissue samples so that they could make something that wouldn’t hurt us, then left. We walked inside a hologram of warmaker iskoort, growling at passers-by and looking for trouble. Nobody tried to bother us.

“I don’t believe this!” Rachel said. “Yeerks!”

I nodded, although I wasn’t paying much attention. I’d gotten over the shock, and was trying to figure out the game here. Maybe the howlers weren’t the point. Maybe we were supposed to… I don’t know, start an iskoort rebellion, help them overthrow their oppressors. Destroy the Kandrona emitters, like our first mission with Ellimist. Except that would hurt the resident yeerks, which were off-limits. But so were their hosts, and somehow, Guide’s had died.

<Prince Jake died for them,> Ax said, sounding disgusted. <He died to protect yeerks.>

“And now we have to devote our lives to saving those yeerks, or we die,” Erek said. “This is exactly the sort of thing that always happens.”

“Their hosts, too,” I said. “Don’t forget that we’re saving the iskoort. Maybe this is why Ellimist picked us, because we know about yeerks. Maybe we’re supposed to… sow the seeds of rebellion among hosts or something, while we’re here. Maybe this is a major turning point in the yeerk war, a place where the hosts fight back and turn the tide; maybe that’s why Crayak wants it gone.”

“Ever the optimist,” Marco said, rolling his eyes.

“I’m just trying to make sense of all this,” I said.

<I’m all for blowing up the Kandronas,> Tobias said. <We killed Guide, so it’s clearly possible.>

“Wouldn’t work,” Erek said. “Not if you plan to do it.”

“Huh?” David asked.

“Guide died by accident, yes? None of you, or the howlers, intended to hurt him; none of you knew there was a chance he’d be hurt. If you did, you couldn’t have done it.” He tapped his head. “See, I don’t think Ellimist and Crayak have built any kind of, you know, temporary law into the universe or anything to prevent iskoort from being hurt. That would be… really complicated. Maybe impossible. Every action has consequences that go on forever; we’d all find ourselves unable to do random things and not know why. I think they’ve just given all of their champions an internal imperative, like a stripped-down version of my own programming. You can’t knowingly hurt them. But the universe is the universe, it’s not changed.”

“So we can still get innocent people killed, we just can’t protect ourselves,” I said. “Great.”

Erek shrugged. “You get used to it.”

<We should find a way,> Tobias said. <If we could take down those Kandronas...>

<Then they would replace them,> Ax said. <This is not Earth. This is a yeerk-controlled planet. Presumably they have spares, and factories for building emitters.>

“Why are you so bloodthirsty today?” David asked Tobias. “You’re not even this gung-ho about Earth yeerks.”

<Hmm… perhaps it’s because they tricked me into selling them my memories? No Earth yeerk has ever had the chance to do what Guide did.>

Rachel paled. “Oh, god, Tobias! Did he…?”

<I don’t know! He must have, right? They… they had me morph human and then stuck this really wide needle in under my eye, which is super gross by the way, and then said they were going to ‘initiate the biointerface’ and something gooey wrapped its way around my brain and started playing my memories, flipping through them like songs in a walkman. I didn’t lose control of my body or anything, but that’s what yeerks do, right? They get in your head and take your memories.>

“I’ll kill him,” Rachel growled. “As soon as he gets his slimy slug butt up out of that pool and comes to us for payment, I’ll find a way to kill him.”

“We promised him all of our memories,” I reminded her.

“Yeah, well, that deal’s off. No way is any yeerk creeping into my brain. He tricked us, hid the procedure from us. The deal doesn’t count.”

“He didn’t trick you,” Erek said. “He’s been fairly straightforward, I think.”

“This is okay for you, is it, Erek?” Rachel snapped. “I know you don’t have to go through it, but yeerks doing this is just all above-board? You don’t see the problem here?”

“I see why it’s a problem for you,” Erek said. “I don’t see how it’s a problem that you expected Guide to anticipate. He doesn’t know where we’re from. He doesn’t know that we fight yeerks. These guys don’t even call yeerks, yeerks. It probably didn’t occur to him to give a detailed rundown of his biology to a bunch of customers. He explained the memory extraction process adequately for most people; it was just bad luck that we’re the exact sort of people to object to the specific details he didn’t mention.”

“You think most people would be okay with it? A yeerk slinking into their brain and taking their memories?”

“I think he explained that the procedure involved getting access to your brain, and you all agreed to it. Tobias said he was clear about there being a biological interface. I don’t see how you expect him to know that his specific biology was the one biological interface you’d object to, after you’d agreed to the generalities.”

“Yeah, well, he’s not doing it again,” Marco said, looking disgusted. “He can go jump into a pile of warmakers. Rachel’s right; deal’s off.”

I glanced around at my friends. Trapped on a foreign planet, fighting to protect our greatest enemy. Erek and Ax were on suicide missions because they’d violated obscure concepts of alien honor, David was still a newbie, Tobias was fighting disgust and trauma over infestation. I had gotten Jake killed.

We were up against seven monsters we couldn’t kill, to save a planetful of monsters we couldn’t kill. And somehow, we had to succeed. We must have been put there to succeed.

What was the game here?


	7. Chapter 7

We tried threatening a couple of iskoort for information, but word seemed to have gotten around that we couldn’t hurt them. In the end, we were directed to the Gossip and Speculation Guild, where we just paid someone for information.

He was named Curator, grub of Engineer, and he seemed to be a cross between a historian and librarian. His host was the flashiest iskoort I’d seen, with bright, multicoloured tendrils framing his face and a loud, trilling whine in his diaphragm.

<What do you want to know about our lovely city, visitors?> he trilled.

“Nuts to your city,” Marco spat. “Tell us about the yeerks. The, uh, yoorts.”

<Ah, you are interested in the biology of the populous! A truly marvellous symbiosis, a microcosm of the city and the planet itself! Each iskoort, you see, is a composite organism – the isk, great in body; the yoort, great in mind. Symbiotes. Every iskoort is a part of something greater!>

“Parasites,” Rachel snapped. “Slavers. You control the isk, don’t you? And you have the gall to call yourselves symbiotes?”

<Our symbiosis has been in place for thousands of years,> Curator said. <It is the true model of a stable – >

“Oh, right, you’ve been slavers for a long time, so that makes it okay,” Rachel shot back.

Marco nodded. “The yeerks win Earth, some aliens come by a thousand years later – ‘oh, it’s okay, we and the humans are _symbiotes_.’”

<No, you misunderstand. The isk were created as hosts for the yoort.>

<So you created a species and then enslaved them,> Tobias said. <That isn’t any better.>

<No… it is true, symbiosis, see? Isk need the yoort to – >

“Is there a way to call up Ellimist and tell him we quit?” David asked Erek. “Leave this planet to the howlers. Seriously.”

I was already morphing, shrinking; my feet lengthening, extra joints forming in my arms. Taking on the form of a trader iskoort. The curator watched with interest.

“Cassie, what are you doing?” Marco asked.

<Checking something,> I said. <I think he’s right. Don’t you remember? Being a trader iskoort? Isk, I mean?>

“I remember it being gross,” David said.

<The holes,> Tobias said. <She means the… holes in your mind.>

I nodded. <I don’t know if it’s… okay, necessarily, to engineer a slave race to want to be slaves,> I said. <It seems iffy to me. Ethically.>

<Isk are not slaves,> the curator said. <An isk is half of a person. A yoort is half of a person. Together we are whole. Isk cannot live long-term without the yoort. Yoort cannot live long-term without the isk.>

<You can’t live without isk?> Tobias asked.

<Half of me cannot live without the other. It was a necessary concession made by our ancestors. Long ago, the yoort were parasites as you describe, taking hosts of all species by force. This strategy was eventually abandoned as it was not profitable in the long term.>

<Not _profitable_? > Tobias asked incredulously.

<There is no sense in pointless conflict. It wastes lives and resources on misaligned priorities and demands. It is far more productive to align priorities and trade.>

I nodded. This spoke to my trader isk instincts. The fragments of instincts I had, with parts missing.

<So our ancestors engineered the isk. A race of bodies to be symbiotes to the yoort. And to be sure that the symbiosis would be complete, the yoort were engineered to be dependent on the isk. One cannot live without the other.>

“The yoort weakened themselves?” David frowned. “Why? That doesn’t make any sense.”

It made sense to me, or at least, to my trader isk instincts. <No, it does. They couldn’t risk rebellion in their own ranks. No; more than that, they couldn’t risk the suspicion of rebellion. They couldn’t risk anybody else even seeing it as a possibility. If the whole society didn’t adapt to this symbiosis, truly and sincerely, it wouldn’t have worked. They would’ve been wiped out by some warrior race when some yoort upstarts decided they didn’t need the isk anymore and tried to enslave someone. They had to make themselves valuable, so they built...> I spread my creepy, multi-jointed arms to indicate the metropolis we stood in. <But it would only work with all their cards on the table.> Then I realised. <That’s it!>

<That’s the game!> Tobias exclaimed, coming to the same realisation. <That’s why Crayak can’t let this place exist. If, a thousand years from now, the yeerks find Iskoort, they’ll see there’s another way.>

I nodded, thinking of Aftran. <There are yeerks in this war right now who don’t want to enslave and invade, who think it’s wrong, but they don’t see any other way to live. If they saw this – and even if they didn’t have the technology to do it themselves, the iskoort could help them!>

“That’s Ellimist’s game in all this,” Marco said, nodding, grinning. “It doesn’t do squat to help us, but still. It’s a backup. Like the human sanctuary.”

<The fact that he’s risking us to set it up doesn’t speak well for our chances on Earth,> I pointed out.

“That’s a later problem,” Rachel said. “For now, we gotta get revenge for Jake.”

“How?” David asked. “How does any of this help us? We’re lost until Guide gets back, if he even comes back.”

<Can we get a map of the city?> I asked Curator.

<Of course.> He waddled into a back room, and returned shortly with a small crystal cone, like the kind that had held Guide’s star map. He handed it to me. I handed it to Ax.

“I can copy the data from it,” Erek volunteered. Ax handed it to Erek.

<The timeline does not make sense,> Ax said. <There should not be yeerks out here. Certainly not from so long ago.>

“They were probably picked up from their home planet long ago,” Erek said. “Abducted as curiosities by unscrupulous traders. It happens a lot more than it should.”

<They’re biologically different to yeerks,> I said. I turned back to Curator, <What was your name again? The whole name?>

<I am Curator,> he said. <Grub of Engineer.>

<See there?> I said. <Grub of. Yeerks don’t have parents.>

“How can they not have parents?” Rachel asked, frowning.

<Yeerks die in reproduction,> Ax explained. <Three yeerks merge to hatch a generation of grubs.>

“Still not seeing how this helps us kill howlers,” David said, arms crossed.

Erek handed the cone back to Curator. To us, he said, “The off-worlder population of this city is currently about one point five per cent. We are four cities away from the spaceport, where the off-worlder population is eighty four per cent. It would be easier to hide there, but it would be equally difficult to find the howlers, and we would lose the protection of the warmaker iskoort.”

“No warmakers there?” Rachel asked. “Why not?”

“They’re somewhat xenophobic. Their numbers increase as you move farther from the spaceport.”

“What’s the area around us here like?” Marco asked.

“Above us are of course the science and engineering levels. They may be useful to directly source weapons, although we’d have a wider – if more expensive – variety on the shopping levels below energy storage. If we descend enough, we’ll end up in areas populated by shopper iskoort.”

“Shopper iskoort?” David asked. “What are shopper iskoort?”

Erek shrugged. “I only have a map.”

<Somebody must shop to buy the items created by artisans and distributed by traders,> Curator said. <Shopper iskoort fulfil a vital role in the economy.>

“They shop?” Marco asked. “They just shop?”

<Are they useful to us?> Tobias asked.

Erek shrugged. “Probably not. Shopping levels go down to the heavy manufacturing and production areas, then overpopulation housing, then the City Base.”

“What’s in the City Base?”

“Just says City Base. Above us… above the engineers and soforth… are forestry, food production, that sort of thing. And storage. Quite a few levels of that, then air vehicle parking.”

“What, like helipads?” Marco asked.

“Something like that,” Erek shrugged.

We paid Curator and left, hiding under Erek’s warmaker iskoort hologram.

“Okay,” Marco said. “Okay. So. We stay out of the way of the howlers until we have this poison. Then we morph, and we… get it to them.” He pressed his lips together. “Somehow.”

“We know how,” Rachel said.

“You realise this plan is stupid, right? You realise how dangerous it is? Pumping ourselves full of a foreign chemical and then letting the enemy _eat us_? You know that’s insane, right?”

“You’re getting cold feet now?” David asked. “After we’ve come this far?”

“No, I’m wondering if there’s a less suicidal way to do this.”

“If you don’t want to do it, I will,” Rachel shrugged with obviously false bravado.

<No, I will,> Ax said firmly.

“We won’t get them all with this trick, no matter how good a poison we can make,” Marco said. “We need to be alive to handle the rest. We need a safer way.”

<I will take down as many as I can,> Ax said. <Even when they attack, I will still have my tail.>

<Ax, you can’t – >

“You might have a chance soon,” Erek whispered. “Quiet!”

We froze. A pair of howlers, walking towards us. Had they heard that we’d been at the Gossip and Speculation Guild? Probably. ‘Gossip’ was in the name.

“We can take ‘em,” Rachel whispered.

“We can’t,” Marco breathed. “We should leave.”

The howlers had been giving us a wide berth, but now they stopped, eyeing our group. Had they heard us? Had they found a way to detect holograms?

<They’re wondering why this group of warmakers isn’t attacking them!> Tobias said.

“Everyone, morph to run before they figure it out,” Marco whispered. He started to shrink. I considered demorphing and morphing something small, but no – I was already a trader isk. They should leave me alone.

A howler drew a weapon and fired experimentally into the hologram. The weapon didn’t fire. If an isk could smile, I would have. It couldn’t shoot if it suspected it might hurt iskoort.

“Where to?” Erek whispered.

<Down,> Tobias said. <Shopping areas. Way more iskoort to hide in.>

Our warmaker hologram headed toward the stairs, grumbling and shoving. We were given a wide berth. The howlers watched us suspiciously as we passed. One of them leapt up to grab the ceiling, crawled above us… and dropped neatly down, right in the middle of the hologram.

Erek’s holographic capabilities were sophisticated, but his hologram was all, fundamentally, one projection – even if he made it solid, he couldn’t simulate the iskoort all just managing to avoid a howler right in their midst. The howler fell through the hologram, landing right in front of Erek.

“Scatter!” Marco yelled, half-fly.

“Stay,” the howler grinned, reaching out to grab his arm. Ax’s tail flashed; the howler dodged, but had to let go of Marco, who bolted.

Tobias fought for altitude, but didn’t leave; he was ready to distract the howlers from our more vulnerable, morphing teammates. I jumped between Marco and the howler in the hologram – he couldn’t be sure I wasn’t an iskoort, and until he was sure, I was safe. But the other howler was coming, now. Erek snatched for its arm, to hold it in place.

“Run!” he yelled. “Just run!”

People scattered. I leapt onto the howler I was trying to block, trying to distract it, pin it down; it tossed me aside. I hit the ground on my side, rolling. Rachel stopped, but I yelled at her to keep running.

The howler that Erek held drew some kind of small, sticky box from his belt and slammed it against Erek’s chest, grinning. Erek immediately dropped him, iskoort hologram around us abruptly vanishing, and ran in the opposite direction, arms crossed over his chest. A moment later, I saw why; the device on his chest exploded, knocking him to the ground.

<Erek?!> I asked privately. He raised a slightly melted hand and waved it vaguely; he was alive.

The howler was drawing another of the sticky boxes from its belt.

<Run!> I shouted at Erek. He leapt to his feet, saw me, planted his stance. <I’m in more danger if you don’t _run_! > I insisted, dashing for the howler. <He can’t hurt me!>

Erek turned and ran.

The howlers were paying me no attention whatsoever. I couldn’t hurt them, I couldn’t be hurt; I was irrelevant. That’s the only explanation I had for why I was able to grab at the howler as it ran after Erek. I closed its fist over the bomb in its hand.

I’d forgotten about the needle hairs. I screeched in my diaphragm in pain as the needles buried themselves in my arm, but I held on.

We were approaching the edge of the platform. (We really, really needed to start hanging out more in the middle of these things.) The howler stopped dead, glancing at the needles in my arm. His grin widened.

“Not iskoort, then,” it said.

Its logic was off. If an iskoort had done what I’d done, I was pretty sure they’d be able to hurt themselves. The howler hadn’t seen me. But the logic didn’t matter. It knew I wasn’t immune to it, so I wasn’t immune.

The howler yanked its fingers open, slammed the bomb against my belly, and threw me off the platform.

As the world flew past I had a singular, dizzying thought: _See you soon, Jake._


	8. Chapter 8

I cleared my mind in seconds. It wasn’t the first time I’d fallen off things. Even Jake hadn’t been killed by something as petty as a fall; he’d been killed by a howler tearing him to pieces.

It was a really long fall – so what? That gave me more time to morph.

Whatever was on the bomb was really, really sticky. It wasn’t coming off with mere isk strength. I started demorphing, aiming for one very singular feature – my morphing outfit.

Spandex rose from my skin. I dipped my incredibly long neck and used my sharp beak to tear away the fabric around the bomb, which I then hurled upwards as hard as I could, far from anyone, before continuing to demorph. Above me, an explosion; my flesh burned, but that didn’t matter. It was temporary flesh.

I looked up. I saw Tobias. Too far away to do anything to help me, but he was alive, and he saw me – he knew I was alive. Besides, I didn’t need help.

I was falling fast. Too fast. Tobias could fly in the iskoort atmosphere just fine, but if I was pretty sure I’d hit whatever the local terminal velocity was, and if I tried to fly at that speed, I’d probably tear my own wings off. It felt a lot faster than Earth. No; I couldn’t fly, and reduce the speed of my fall. I could only reduce my mass.

I closed my eyes. I focused. I wished I had a flea or something, like some of the other Animorphs did; they would be the perfect morphs for this. Weirdly enough, this had not been one of the scenarios we’d ever planned for.

What did I have that would best survive the fall? Ant? Fly? Termite.

I had never, ever wanted to be a termite again. But there weren’t too many options. I forced myself to focus, forced myself to shrink and let my organs dissolve and my mind… my mind…

It had been a very long time since my first and last experiment with the termite morph. I was much more experienced, now, at controlling my morphs. I was much better at getting a handle on all kinds of instincts, or their absences. And here, I would be safe from the commands of a termite nest; here, there would be no termite pheremones to grip my simple termite brain.

I let myself lighten and harden, let the winds buffet me about and slow my fall. I was ready for the hive mind, but I had a secret weapon against it this time. I had the perfect mental armour. I struggled to remember the feeling of Jake dying in my mind, that sick grief, that sudden shot of mortality. Something no termite had ever felt, something no termite could understand. _I am not you,_ I told the termite. _I am not this. This is just a tool, this body… but I am not_.

And then I waited.

It was a long fall. A very, very long fall.

The others… had they survived? I had seen them run. I had seen Tobias alive. Had the howlers managed to track any of them down? Had the other howlers come running to cut them off? Did the howlers think I was dead? Probably. I might be able to surprise them. They might think they had the upper hand, although in reality our numbers were even. Assuming they hadn’t killed any of the others.

I kept falling. Something around me changed. Open air became replaced with tall, stiff shafts – long vegetation of some kind. It was still moving fast. Too fast. I grabbed at it, and lost a leg.

I landed in sludge. The impact crushed me; the thick muck sucked me down. Through the pain, I demorphed. The long, grasslike vegetation around me stood straight up, stiff and hard, and reached to my chest height. The edges were sharp; just the act of demorphing lacerated my skin and shredded by already ruined morphing suit even further. Walking back through it was going to be impossible.

How was I ever going to find my way back?

I looked around. It was about midmorning, and a haze surrounded the bright yellow sun, dulling its glare. That haze hadn’t existed from the part of the city we’d been in, meaning it was lower; probably a thick layer clinging to the ground. The mud sucked at my feet, dragging me very slowly down. The smell was oddly familiar. I couldn’t place it at first; not until something swimming in it bumped into my ankle and squirmed over my foot, making be jump.

A yeerk pool! The ground was a yeerk pool!

Yoort pool. Whatever.

As for the city… I was pretty sure I could see it. It was difficult to be sure, because I could see multiple huge, multi-layered cities scattered about, and I had no idea which one had my friends in it. And huge… huge did not begin to describe them. Nothing ever built on Earth even came close. The pyramids would not have made the footing for the smallest pillar at the base of one of them. The Sears Tower and the Empire State Building were Tinkertoys.

The iskoort may have been the most obnoxious people in the galaxy, but they could definitely build. And there were six of these things in my immediate field of view, surrounding me. The wind had blown me about far too much for me to even guess at which one my friends were in.

I dragged one foot out of the mud, through the pool sludge on top of it, and stepped forward. Pointy grass sliced at my feet. There was no way I could walk through this; under normal circumstances, it would take hours to reach a tower, and with the grass cutting up my feet I’d have to remorph every few steps. What did I have that could do it? Horse? No. Hork-bajir, maybe?

That was when I saw something moving through the grass. It was difficult to make out at first because it moved on all fours and was rather shorter than the grass. But it was bright red, and covered in thick, leathery skin, with two eyes on long stalks. It moved very, very quickly, unhurt by the grass, and not breaking it as it slipped through.

It ran straight for me.

I turned to run. Pointless. What was I going to do, slice my legs to nothing for no reason? I needed to morph. I focused on hork-bajir, but before I could even begin to change, it was upon me, rearing up, front feet planted on my ribs.

No, not feet… hands. Isk hands. Each with a long tentacle finger and two hook fingers. It whistled faintly as it breathed. A new kind of isk.

<The visitor is lost?> it asked, cocking its head. <Off-worlders should not be here. No, no. You should be in the cities.>

“Sorry,” I said. “I, um, fell down. Can you help me get back to the city?”

<Which city?> it asked.

I didn’t know. Dammit. Guide had told me, I was sure he had, but I couldn’t remember. It hadn’t seemed important.

“Um. I don’t know. Not the spaceport; it’s a little way from the spaceport. There are warmaker iskoort and traders and… um...” What else could I say about it that would mean anything to this iskoort? “You don’t know what a howler is, do you?”

The iskoort whistled uncertainly. <The visitor should not be here. This is for tender iskoort. It is dangerous for off-worlders.>

Other iskoort… tender iskoort, I supposed… were approaching. They quickly surrounded me. They physically lifted me off the ground, onto someone’s back, and started running for one of the cities.

I clenched my teeth and braced myself for the feel of razor-sharp grass, but there was none. The others ran ahead, pulling it out of the way; not damaging it, but brushing the blades aside so that they wouldn’t touch me. They sprang back into place behind us. Was this grass what they were supposed to tend, perhaps?

I acquired the one I was riding. I felt weird about it, not asking permission, but there seemed no way to start that conversation. Tender iskoort didn’t seem all that bright. Besides, none of that really mattered at this point – Jake was dead, and soon the rest of us would be, too. I didn’t have much time left to use any of my morphs, sapient or not. But until then, we had to kill as many howlers as we could. A fast, local morph, with dense skin and agility? I could probably use that.

Less than ten minutes later, I was deposited on a broad metal platform that served as the base of one of the cities. It was only then that I could see the true scope of the cities; from the distance, the height and width had been obvious, but on the bare bottom platform, my view broken by nothing but the occasional support pillar or staircase, I could see that the width of the tower stretched over the horizon. Each level could have been as big as my home town. Bigger, maybe. We’d been hugging one little corner of one of these things the whole time.

I turned to thank the tender iskoort, but they were already gone. I was alone.

I morphed hork-bajir, healing my wounds and growing more durable muscles. And I began to climb.


	9. Chapter 9

The hork-bajir did not like the city. It was lost without the trees. The brilliant, bold colors of the iskoort city were mostly dull and uninteresting to hork-bajir eyes, which could distinguish dozens of subtle shades of brown and green, but little else. The flat surfaces were uncomfortable to a being who navigated and moved through its world by subtle differences in bark, soil and stone.

I climbed anyway. A level up from the ground was a maze of hallways with rows of doors, each with complicated symbols etched into their bold white surfaces in various colours. The walls were white enough to hurt the eyes, and lines scrawled up and around the walls in all sorts of bright colours as if a bunch of sugar-high children had been set loose with neon pens. There were occasional murals that made no sense to me until I stumbled on one that I recognised as a floor plan. Maps, for different kinds of aliens? Maybe. There certainly were a lot of non-iskoort about; people who looked to be made of wire and tottered about on six long legs, centipedes as long as buses, and something black, red and incredibly agile that crawled along the roof and looked unnervingly like spider-man. I saw only two servant iskoort, neither of whom paid me a great deal of attention.

I used the floor plan to navigate to the next level. This one was bright blue, covered in several buildings that looked like igloos. Again, there were a lot of aliens about. I wondered where I could get information on them. Perhaps some of them would make really useful morphs? Could I afford the time to stop and research, when I had to get back to the others and finish saving the planet?

A few more levels up, and things started to become more familiar. I was in a shopping district, much like the one we’d ended up in shortly after arriving on Iskoort. The difference here was that there was about one trader iskoort every twenty square feet trying to buy my organs rather than one every two feet, which made all the difference. The rest of the space was taken up by off-worlders, many of whom were engaged in intense negotiation with traders, keeping anyone from getting mobbed. It made the whole place a lot more tolerable. There were no warmakers. I saw a handful of iskoort of a new type; tall and silent, with four eyes instead of two and long, prehensile noses. They lurked in corners and watched what off-worlders bought with great interest, standing in groups or three or four. They didn’t seem to be doing anything. I asked a trader what they were.

<Shopper iskoort,> he said. <They are observing market trends to shop appropriately in the Inner Districts. How much for one of your blades? I will pay extra for a symmetrical pair.>

Inner districts! That’s where Guide had said we were. An inner artisan’s district? Was there more to the name than that? Maybe I should just point out that I was trying to find the most insane city on the planet. That should lead me right back to the others.

I sold some skunk musk for a decent hot meal. I could’ve gotten more value for one of my hork-bajir blades, but my hork-bajir morph was Jara, and it felt… wrong… to go around selling other people’s body parts without their permission. Even if it was just a copy. Even if it wouldn’t affect him.

And there was no way I was selling memories.

I was halfway through a meal of delicious spicy stewed… something… when the familiar voice rang in my head.

<Ah yes, there you are! Are you well?>

I jumped, and looked up. “Guide! Are you okay? Sorry about the… um...” I stared at his neck. To my surprise, it was the same neck – the place where his head had been severed was clearly visible, stitched neatly closed. A brace held his head motionless. “Wait, your head was cut off! Your isk’s head, I mean. How… how did…?”

Guide gave a whine that I knew by now to be one of amusement. <You think I would abandon my isk over something as simple as death? It would be highly wasteful to have to replace isk every time they died, and hardly equitable, given how much more dangerous it is to be a body than a mind. No, isk nervous tissue is preserved if it is deprived of oxygen. Revival is often possible.> He touched his neck. <Of course, I am now even more interested in buying your shapeshifting technology, having seen you heal wounds with it. Truly, I will pay top price.>

“Even if I wanted to, I don’t have the device with me,” I said. “How did you find me?”

<I have connections, of course. That is why I am the best guide in the Inner Districts. I will be working here near the spaceport before you know it! I had your android create an image of you and distributed it among my contacts, offering credit for information. It was easy. Come, I have arranged transport.>

We walked up two more flights of stairs (I was getting really, really sick of stairs) to a small… well, I suppose it was an airplane and not a hang glider, because it had an engine attached to the back. It was a complicated mess of sailcloth, ropes and bars that looked like it was intended to glide, but made by someone who didn’t understand how 3-dimensional space worked. It looked ready to collapse in and mince its occupants into a pulpy mess at any moment.

There were a few crossbars arranged below the wings that looked like they could theoretically seat a human or two. I climbed in (no seatbelts or safety straps) and held on like my life depended on it. Which, given the height and the bladed ground below, it did.

Guide showed no fear or hesitation whatsoever as he slid in next to me and jammed his tentacle fingers into a couple of holes in the arrangement of cloth, ropes and bars. He looped them around some bits of cloth, gave the thruster behind us a sharp kick (really, a kick), and we shot jerkily forward into empty space.

I screamed, hands already cramping where I was gripping bars far too tightly. But once we were in the air, the journey was surprisingly smooth. The engine was silent, and Guide kept us steady with subtle tugs and twists on the ropes as we glided out over the sludgy ground and slowly up, up towards the higher levels of another tower.

“You’re good at this!” I yelled at him over the rush of air.

<I got my accreditation to enter the Tourism Guild as a scenic flight pilot!> he told me. <But guiding within the city is far more rewarding. There are so many great experiences to share!>

We were climbing steeply as we headed steadily towards the city. We reached it about two-thirds up; high enough for the ground to be invisible, for looking down to reveal nothing but the bases of cities shrinking into obscurity. Guide landed the vehicle with a sudden stop that sent me sprawling out of the front, landing heavily on the ground. I got shakily to my feet.

<Your friends await us in the gardens,> Guide said, leading the way up yet more stairs.

“You guys need to invent elevators,” I told him.

Guide dismissed this with a wave of one hand. <What value is the memory of the inside of an elevator? Even with glass walls, it is little better than watching a projection. No, stairs are far more scenic.>

We emerged in a forest. There was no other way to describe it. The ground was thick, loamy soul under crumbly orange flakes that were kind of like fallen leaves. Plants, or the local equivalent of them, stretched upward all around, spreading out in branches… no, more like tendrils… and wrapping around each other, completely hiding the ceiling. I’d never been in a rainforest, but I dreamed of one occasionally – something induced by reading about them too much and listening to Jake’s nightmare stories, probably – and it looked kind of like this level. There were exceptions, of course; the plants were not Earth plants, and resembled slightly quivering tentacles more than wood, mostly green but shot with streaks of all sorts of colors. The leaves looked and felt like coloured scraps of paper. I could have sworn that one of the trees was watching me.

There were smaller plants, too; lush mosses and long, ropelike vines that sprouted beautiful multicoloured things that, for lack of a better term, could probably be considered analogous to flowers. One particular moss was a bright, glowing yellow, and it lit the dense forest as if everything was in sunlight. I tried not to step on anything, but the few times I stumbled, I found that my weight didn’t seem to bruise anything. Insects like huge, multi-winged butterflies darted around, and white balls like dandelion heads drifted between the trees, but instead of merely drifting on a breeze they actively dodged around us as we passed. Something green and shiny with very long toes, huge adorable eyes and a prehensile tail stared down at us from above. The heady air of the level was making me feel a little giddy.

The others were waiting in what passed for an open space, a gap in the trees so large that you could even glimpse some of the ceiling. Marco lay on the soft moss, blowing on one of the dandelion creatures so that it danced around his breath. Rachel paced restlessly nearby. Ax stood guard, one stalk eye on us as we approached, his hooves the only thing doing any damage to the ground cover. David closely examined some odd leaves. Erek leaned against a tree, human hologram up, eyes closed.

<They approach,> Ax said, indicating us with one stalk eye. Rachel spun, eyes locking onto me.

“Oh, thank god!” She ran over and gave me a quick hug.

“Is everyone okay?” I asked. “Where’s Tobias?”

“Scouting.” She shook a small glass jar full of purple liquid. “We’ve got our poison. The bioengineers say it should paralyse a howler for a few minutes. If it works properly. Which it might or might not; we can’t know without testing.” She grimaced. “Still, it’s the best chance we’ve got.”

“But it won’t hurt us?”

“It shouldn’t hurt andalites, or any mammals. Earth mammals, I mean. Assuming all earth mammals have the same blood and nerves and stuff? I told the engineers I was pretty sure they did.”

I nodded. “A couple of weird quirks, but for most mammals it’s basically all the same.”

“Alright. We’d best figure out how we’re going to do this. Soon as Tobias gets – ”

<Guys! Guys, you’re not going to believe this! Look who I found!> Tobias yelled in our heads, tearing between trees and banking hard to land on a branch above Ax’s head. I looked back the way he’d come, and everything in me froze at once. I was seeing something impossible. I was seeing something that couldn’t be there.

Walking calmly down an avenue between the trees, carefully avoiding alien flowers while alien dandelion seeds floated about his hair in a sparling cloud, was Jake.


	10. Chapter 10

I ran.

He ran.

Clouds of multi-winged butterflies erupted around us as we crashed through the artificial jungle, red and violet streaked trees trembled, some treeclimber above chattered admonishments as we closed the space between us. Heedless of anything else, we ran right into each other; his weight nearly knocked the wind out of me and I ran my hands up his arms, over his chin, through his hair just to make sure that yes, it was him, he was real, he was alive. My eyes met his and saw nothing but pure joy; my joy and his reflected between us, like two mirrors pointed at each other. And then I was kissing him and he was kissing me and the oxygen-rich jungle air was causing my heart to pound and my mind to soar and my fingers were twisted in his hair and his arms were drawn around my waist like we never wanted to let each other go and…

“It’s about time,” Rachel grumbled behind us, and I remembered that the rest of the universe existed. I pulled away, my face flushed.

Jake looked to Marco, waiting for his inevitable comment.

“What,” Marco said, “no kiss for me?”

Jake rolled his eyes. Marco looked to Rachel and pursed his lips.

“Gee, Marco, what do you think are the chances I’ll kiss you?” she asked. “Slim, none, or I’ll-break-both-your-arms?”

But she pulled Jake into a bone-crushing hug.

<Prince Jake!> Ax raced up. He reached out, like he was going to touch Jake, then seemed to think better of it, lowering his hand and snapping an andalite salute with his tail. <On any scrap of honor I have left, I will give my life before losing you again.>

“Thanks, Ax, but you’re still not permitted to commit suicide, even in battle,” Jake said. He glanced over the group, including Erek, David, Tobias and Guide back in the clearing. “Is everyone okay?”

“Yes, but you shouldn’t be,” Rachel said, prodding him in the chest. “You were dead. Properly dead. There’s no mistaking it. How?”

“There’s not some weird loophole where nobody can die and that other howler is coming back, is there?” Marco asked. “Did we misread this fight-to-the-death thing somehow? If we have to work out the rules again from scratch I’m gonna be so mad.”

“I don’t know anything about that. I definitely died. I saw… him again, Crayak, just for a second, and then...” Jake shrugged.

“How?” I asked. “What, exactly, happened?”

“I was falling with that howler, and my first thought was to go bird and get out of there, but it would crush me if I did. It was taking pieces out of me as I demorphed. So I took the only chance I had – I figured there was a chance that maybe if I was in isk morph, it couldn’t hurt me. Because of the rules, you know?” He shrugged. “Turns out I was super wrong about that. It made hamburger meat out of me. I didn’t even get to see the ground.”

“And then?” Marco asked.

“And then I woke up in morph, with most of my body in some kind of cast, and a lot of very distressed-sounding people asking me if I could please try to remember where my yoort was.” He glanced at Guide. “It was a very awkward conversation on all sides, let me tell you.”

“So you know, then?” I asked. “About the isk and the yoort?”

He nodded. “You guys all know?”

“Yeah?”

“How’d everyone take it?”

“Well, it’s the best answer for a yeerk problem, isn’t it?” I shrugged. “I would’ve expected Ax to be a bit… he’s still in kind of a slump, though, from that first battle. Everyone was more focused on getting revenge for you. Tobias took everything pretty badly, since he’d already sold his memories without knowing about it.”

“What does that have to do with – ?” Jake’s eyes widened. “They didn’t!”

I shrugged. “Not much we can do about it now, is there? Anyway, we all owe our memories to Guide, so… yeah. Haven’t had that awkward conversation yet.”

“No time like the present,” Jake said, with sudden steel in his voice. He marched towards the clearing. “Guide! We need to talk!”

“He comes back from the dead only to march off to get himself killed by a second-rate salesman,” Marco muttered. “Why do we listen to this guy again?”


	11. Chapter 11

Guide listened to Jake’s explanation. He was not happy. Jake explained further. He was even less happy.

<We had a deal,> Guide said, diaphragm whining very loudly.

“I know, and we’re not trying to rip you off, I swear,” Jake said. “We just want to trade something else.”

“We can make organs,” I said. “So many organs. Blood, perhaps?”

<Your tissues are unique, but not as unique as your memories. No, I must have them.>

“Well, you can’t,” Marco shrugged.

Guide crossed his arms. <Please do not make me involved the Guildmasters in this issue. You will wish they had left you to the howlers.>

“Before this gets unpleasant,” Erek cut in, “perhaps I can offer a suitable substitute in trade?”

<Your memories are not harvestable,> Guide said dismissively. <We could make audiovisual displays, but that is not the same thing.>

“But it’s popular, right? Cheaper, maybe, but Tobias had no trouble getting hold of them. I’m guessing that a lot of off-worlders choose not to have alien memories implanted in their brains, right? Instead they view them through cut-rate emitters like the one we used.”

Guide hummed angrily. <Those emitters are the finest available for – > But before he could finish, he halted in amazement.

We were no longer in the artificial jungle. We were somewhere else entirely. Erek, hologram dropped, stood in the middle of our group, arms spread. Around us stretched open plains of pale green grass dotted with enormous mushrooms as big as I was. Trees were scattered here and there; not woody leaved trees like on Earth or the strange vines of Iskoort, but smooth green trunks that split into smaller and smaller leafless branches, going from green to bright pink as they branched out, so from a distance they looked like little pink balls of steel wool on sticks. Strange, three-legged animals sat on nests on some of the mushrooms. Above, some kind of cross between a jellyfish and a biological hot-air balloon drifted past under the soft glow of two suns.

I knew what this was. I’d seen it before, long ago, in Erek’s basement. We were seeing the pemalite homeworld. Erek’s homeworld.

“This,” Erek said grandly, “is how one views a chee memory.”

He shut it off. His human hologram settled back into place. “I can make a schematic of the emitters for you. You have all the necessary materials available on this planet to build them relatively cheaply, and the manufacturing sophistication to do so.”

Guide tried, and failed, to not look impressed. <Still, just for a… slightly improved entertainment system...>

“They’re the same emitters that make the hologram I wear day-to-day,” he said.

<Well, I am sure that the short-term realism breaks down when – >

“My entire race has been pretending to be human for over twenty thousand of your local years. Humans can’t tell the difference.”

Guide glanced at us.

“He’s right,” Marco said. “We had to smell him to notice that anything was up.”

“Not in a creepy way,” Jake added.

“You can have the emitter schematics right now, to pay for your help so far,” Erek said.

<Deal!> Guide said, barely waiting for him to finish.

“Of course, you will want files sufficiently sophisticated to show off the technology,” he added. “It’ll take you awhile to re-encode the memory copies you have, and you’ll want something to play in the meantime. I have over thirty thousand local years’ worth of continuous memories appropriate for play with these emitters. The emitters are yours now, all the memories are yours when we defeat the howlers – on the condition that all seven of my friends survive. Is that acceptable?”

Guide weighed this. It wasn’t hard to tell what he was thinking. Judging by his initial reactions, I was pretty sure that Erek had just handed him the value of the city we were standing in, but most of that was based on the possibility of us all surviving, and who knew what expenses he was going to have to pay for, betting on that very slim chance? Still…

<These emitters. They can be produced locally?>

“In this very city. An iskoort with your connections shouldn’t have any trouble.”

<Mmm. Very well, then. I will accept this in lieu of the others’ memories.>

“Great,” Marco said. “Can we get back to the mission now?”

“Guys?” David asked. “Where did Ax go?”

We looked around. No Ax.

“Guys!” Rachel looked around desperately. “Where did the poison go?!”

“Oh, no!” Marco groaned. “Oh, that idiot!”


	12. Chapter 12

<He can’t have gone far,> Tobias said. <We should split up and search.>

“And then all be alone for the howlers to gang up on?” David asked. “We’d be putting ourselves in even more danger than him; at least he has the poison! How is that going to help?”

“Guide,” I said, “you found me; can you find him?”

<Yes, but not quickly.>

“I might be able to find him,” Jake said “Everyone, combat morphs, now. Tobias, hork-bajir.”

<Why a – >

“No time, I’ll explain while morphing!”

I started morphing. Leopard fur crept over my skin, my eyes changed, by feet lengthened…

Jake wasn’t morphing. He waited a full minute, for the rest of us to get about halfway there, before he started.

“When I was falling with that howler, it was taking pieces out of me as I demorphed,” Jake said. “I needed to try to slow it down somehow. So...” He started to morph. His skin darkened and cracked, revealing bright red underneath. His hair sucked into his head, only to be replaced by a stripe of white fur trailing down his back.

<You acquired a howler?> Marco asked.

<Why didn’t we think of that?> David asked. <It’s so obvious!>

“If howlers do have collective memory, and if they’ve spotted Ax, I might ‘remember’ where to go,” Jake said. “But I don’t know if I can control the instincts. These are shock troops designed to do nothing but kill, kill, kill. We’ve lost control of birds and eels and even termites before. This morph is going to be insane.” He stopped morphing partway through, and glanced at Rachel. She wasn’t done, but she was bulky, her paws huge.

Jake backed against a tree. “Rachel, I need you to put your paws to my throat. Everyone else, be ready to back her up. If I start that howl – ”

<No!> I yelled. <We just got you back! You died once, now you want Rachel to kill you? How dare you do that to her? There are other ways to save Ax!>

<There aren’t other ways to stop the howlers,> Marco said. <We save Ax, and we also learn if Jake can control this morph. If he can, it might be our only chance at winning.>

“Rachel?” Jake said. “I can’t finish morphing until...”

Reluctantly, Rachel lumbered forward and put her paws to Jake’s throat. I hurriedly finished my own morph, ready to leap and attack my best friend if she tried to kill my… Jake. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. I couldn’t fight off the other Animorphs, especially with a rogue howler in our midst trying to kill us.

Jake finished the morph. He stood, frozen, staring at nothing.

<Jake?> I asked. <You okay?>

<Do you know where Ax is?> Tobias asked.

“No,” Jake said. “I mean, yes, I’m okay. Guys, we read this whole thing wrong! The howlers, we – ”

<Ax,> Marco reminded him sharply.

“Uh… there are memories, but they’re… not coming through quickly. It’s like when you have to go to a really big website on terrible bandwidth, I guess? I’m not getting anything yet but… wait! I know where the howlers are!”

<Where?> Tobias asked.

“Above us. And below us. There’s a cluster that might be engaged in battle below but… No! They’re moving! They’re all on the move!”

“Where to?” Erek asked.

“Here! They’re coming right for us!”


	13. Chapter 13

<Everyone in the trees!> Marco yelled.

“They’re after me,” Jake said. “They can sense where I am. I’ll lead them off while you all morph.”

<Absolutely not,> I snapped. <Demorph and get away from here. Monkeys, everyone.>

<We don’t have monkeys,> Rachel pointed out, already shrinking. <Squirrels.>

<Whatever. But do it away from here! Erek, hide Guide.>

<Do not worry,> Guide droned, <the howlers cannot – >

<They can and will hurt you if they believe you’re one of us!> I snapped, running from the area as quickly as I could.

Human… then squirrel… was I fast enough? Could I make it? Was Jake demorphing, or was he doing some blatantly stupid macho heroic thing where he was going to try to lead seven howlers away by himself? Didn’t he understand that him being alive was a miracle, a miracle we couldn’t squander? If the isk hadn’t had that one particular quirk in their biology…

Jake later. Morph now. If he was being an idiot, he wasn’t going to stop being an idiot until everyone was safely morphed. I let myself shrink, let my hands twist into tiny squirrel paws. As soon as I was capable of it, I grabbed a veiny tree and dashed up to hide near the ceiling, hoping there were no predators up there.

Then the howlers marched in.

They spread out to search, so I supposed Jake must have managed to demorph. Was he able to hide properly? Was he with Erek? Or had he managed to morph squirrel?

<Everyone okay?> Jake asked in our heads.

One by one, the Animorphs responded. We were all okay.

<That was close,> David said shakily. <I guess that morph’s out, then.>

<Yeah,> Jake agreed distantly. <Guys, that morph… there’s something we all need to talk about. We’ve been doing this wrong. The howler’s mind… it isn’t what I expected.>

<What do you mean?> Marco asked.

<Not now,> Jake said. <Erek and Ax need to be in this conversation.>

The howlers searched the whole area, becoming more frustrated as they went. At one point, one drew a beam weapon and aimed at one of the more flammable-looking trees, only to be stopped by its partner.

Eventually, they left.

We dropped down and demorphed.

“Anyone else think this is way too much morphing for one day?” David asked, panting.

“It gets like this, I’m afraid,” I said, trying to hide the fact that I was equally exhausted.

“Now to find another way to find Ax,” Jake said. “Before those seven howlers do.”

<I am here, Prince Jake,> Ax said stepping forward out of a (presumably holographic) tree, which disappeared moments later to reveal Erek and Guide. <And there are six howlers, not seven.> He tossed something vaguely round but uneven at Jake’s feet and snapped off an andalite salute. The object rolled a couple of feet before coming to rest, staring up at the canopy with pale blue eyes.

A howler head.


	14. Chapter 14

“No way!” David laughed. “Dude, that rules!”

“You took that down by yourself?” Marco asked. “By _yourself_?”

<Not by myself. I had the advantage of poison.>

“Crazy suicidal Ax might not be great in the long run, but this part is pretty awesome,” Rachel mumbled to me. I nodded. I’d half-expected him to fight to the death. Was this one kill enough to restore his honor, in his eyes? I searched his expression, but it was filled with nothing but attentive apprehension while he stared at Jake.

Jake stared at the head. Then he looked up at Ax. “Well done, Ax,” he said. “You’ve accomplished more than any of us could do, even as a group; taking down a howler without dying. I’m impressed.” He turned away, and I saw something strange briefly cross his features. Something like… grief?

Ax snapped off an andalite salute.

Jake glanced, very briefly, at Tobias, who was staring at him from the treetops. A private conversation? He spun back to face Ax.

“You’re a worthy warrior, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill,” Jake said.

Ax stood so far to attention that he looked like he was going to fall over. <Prince Jake,> he said, <I am an _aristh_. It is unseemly to –  >

“Yeah, well, I don’t work for the andalite military and you still call me your Prince. If I’m a Prince then you’re a warrior. If the andalite High Command don’t like it then they can take it up with me after they get done pinning a Seerow’s Kindness violation on you that wasn’t your fault, and get off their butts and come help us actually defend our planet. You single-handedly took out the chosen soldier of a goddamn genocide god today, and if it weren’t for you both Earth and Leera would be yeerk territory by now. Any andalites who don’t see that can kiss my primitive human butt. This isn’t up for debate.”

<I did not work alone, Prince Jake,> Ax said modestly. <The poison plan was a group effort. And it was chance that kept me alive; the howlers would most definitely have killed me had they not been distracted halfway through the battle and all run off to here.>

“They were after Jake,” Marco said. “He’s got a howler morph. They can tell where each other are, and when he showed up on their radar...” he shrugged.

“Why, though?” David asked. “If they were already going to beat Ax, why not finish him off first? A bird in the hand and all that.”

“Jake became a bigger priority,” I said thoughtfully. “Why? Because he has the most dangerous morph of all of us?”

Rachel shook her head. “It wasn’t any more dangerous a morph right then than in the future. I mean, there was no reason to deal with it right away – he wasn’t going to get _more_ dangerous. Why did it have to be dealt with right then?”

“Memory!” Marco said, suddenly. “Jake said that he thought they had a collective memory, but that it was taking a bit of time to comb through. There must be something in there they don’t want us to know!”

“I don’t like where this is going,” I muttered.

“Guys,” Jake said, “that doesn’t matter right now. Look, I was just in a howler’s mind. We got this all backwards. They’re not crazed killers.”

<Yeah, they… kind of are,> Tobias said. <It’s the one thing they do.>

Jake shook his head. “It’s a game,” he said. “Howler instincts are… nothing but joy, the love of the chase, the… like a dolphin leaping into the air just for the sheer joy of the feeling of it. That’s what killing is to a howler.”

“Oh, well, as long as they really enjoyed slaughtering my creators, I guess that’s okay then,” Erek said sarcastically.

“Um, yeah,” Rachel said. “It sounds like you’re describing basically the worst people ever. If dolphins took pleasure in killing – ”

“They do,” I said.

“… Well, okay, if dolphin had that kind of fun just killing and doing nothing else, then we’d have wiped them off the face of the planet.”

“They don’t know they’re evil,” Jake objected. “They’re made in factories. They have no mature phase; they have a lifespan of about five years before they’re killed by Crayak. They’re children. An entire race of children, who don’t know any better. They don’t know they’re evil!”

“News flash, Jake,” Marco said, “Nobody knows they’re evil. Everyone thinks they’re the good guys, and does what they enjoy. Nazis didn’t think they were evil. Slave owners didn’t think they were evil. Even yeerks don’t think they’re evil. But slaughtering planet after planet for sheer fun and not having enough respect for the inhabitants to even consider that killing them for your sick games might be wrong? That seems to me to be the very core of evil.”

Jake glanced at me, asking for backup. I said nothing. I was trying to figure out the game still. Erek had said that Crayak and Ellimist liked to copy each others’ tricks; were the howlers a copy of the pemalites, or the pemalites a copy of the howlers? Joy in life, joy in death. The howlers had won; did that make them the ‘better’ option? Was any of this relevant, or was I just distracting myself with mental puzzles so I wouldn’t have to deal with the mental conundrum being proposed?

<If I may, Prince Jake,> Ax said respectfully.

“Hmm?”

<The personality of the howlers is not, I believe, relevant to this issue. The rules of the game are ironclad: we die, or they die. If we die, so does this planet. If they die, Iskoort is saved, at least from this particular threat. It does not matter that this is a planet of yeerks. It does not matter that our enemies take great joy in genocide. It does not matter that a trickster being who has caused great harm throughout history has caught us in the middle of his game with a universe-destroying abomination. What matters is this: our mission is to protect Earth. Earth will fall if we are not there to do so. To get home, we must kill these howlers, and save Iskoort.>

<Ax-man is right,> Tobias said. <I think these howlers deserve to die, personally, but even if you’re right, Jake… casualties of war. It’s not like it’s the first time we’ve killed innocents to protect other innocents. Every involuntary host that falls in battle is in that boat.>

Jake didn’t look convinced. But he knew when he was outvoted, and he didn’t seem to have any other plans. He just nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Six howlers to go. What’s next?”

We all looked at each other.

“Kind of already used all our big ideas, I think,” Rachel shrugged. “I don’t think they’ll fall for poison a second time.”

“They are getting more and more alert for holograms,” Erek added. “Sooner or later they’re going to find a foolproof method to detect them.”

“We can heal,” I said thoughtfully. “That’s been a huge advantage and kept us alive this long. But… they seem to be learning more about us than we are about them. They’re beating us in brawn; we _have_ to up our game in the brains department.”

“We need whatever it is that the howlers didn’t want Jake to see,” Marco said.

I hesitated. “Are we sure there’s anything there? Maybe we were misreading the situation.”

Marco shrugged. “Got any better ideas?”

I didn’t, of course.

“Okay,” Jake said. He looked pale, but he didn’t complain. “There’s no telling how long this will take. We need somewhere safe. Really safe. The best stronghold in the city. And then...”

“And then you remember stuff really hard, Fearless Leader,” Marco said, thumping Jake on the shoulder. “And we’ll protect you.”


	15. Chapter 15

Together, we planned Operation: Stop Jake From Dying Again.

Nobody liked this plan. But nobody had any better ideas.

First, we needed the most howler-inaccessible location we could find. We talked through a lot of locations; heavily armoured residences, underwater with Jake in some kind of diving bell, acquiring something big and strong and faster than a howler and just continually moving Jake out of their reach… David’s idea of simply travelling to a city more than two hours away and doing it there sounded like a good one until Guide explained that the byzantine travel rules of the planet wouldn’t let us move that far away from the spaceport without weeks of organization and bribes.

“This whole planet makes no sense,” Marco muttered, shaking his head. It made sense to me; I’d seen the spaceport city and the shopper iskoort, I understood how the spaceport city had to be tourist-perfect, and as you moved further away you got cities that tourists were discouraged from entering, first by warmaker iskoort and, as you moved further out, laws. I saw the shopper iskoort noting market trends among the tourists, to return to their home cities and buy similarly, so that farther-away cities acted as models, training grounds, to make the perfect tourist cities and keep the economic wheels of Iskoort turning. How the isk and the yoort had used this system to make themselves valuable, and therefore safe.

But we didn’t have time for sociological trivia. We had to focus on the howlers.

Then I remembered something. “Hang on,” I said. “Guide, when you were bringing me back here, you said something about sky tours?”

<Some visitors wish to see the sights of our beautiful planet from high above,> Guide said. <The majesty of our towers, the beauty of the morning fog shining over the pools below...>

“Great,” I said. “Erek? Ax? Can howlers fly?”

And so we booked a sky tour.

We really only had one requirement – we wanted to get nice and far from the cities, and stay there. We ended out booking what was basically a hot-air balloon. Guide offered to pilot it for us, but we insisted on hiring the proper pilot, another trader iskoort who was somewhat older than Guide who was, of course, named Pilot. I didn’t bother remembering his family names.

We brought Guide along, too, of course. Nobody wanted to say it, but we needed some real iskoort on board so that the howlers couldn’t just shoot us from the sky when they eventually caught up. Two iskoort were better than one.

The next step was planning our morphs. Most of our useful combat morphs weren’t going to be ideal for an air battle. I suggested isk morphs; the howlers would know that there were some real isk aboard just due to the numbers, and wouldn’t be able to hurt us since they couldn’t tell us apart.

Rachel shook her head. “That one howler threw you off the edge had no problem with your isk morph,” she said. “We can’t risk them figuring it out again, only for us to be stuck in bodies that can’t fight.”

“And they’d know which iskoort were you,” Jake said. “If I can see their memories, they can probably see mine. I know what Guide and Pilot look like. It’d be obvious which iskoort you were.”

<We’re going to be in the sky,> Tobias said. <We should be flying.>

“Most of our bird morphs are pretty delicate,” Jake said.

“And they won’t have the firepower to protect Jake,” I added.

<Hork-bajir, then,> Tobias said. <Strong, agile, can climb and balance really well.>

Jake nodded. “Good idea. Okay – Rachel and David should be eagles, in case we do need air support. Everyone else, hork-bajir. Yes, you too, Ax – your andalite tail is great, but if you get pushed off the edge of something I’m not confident in your ability to climb back up.”

I expected Ax to argue, but he simply saluted and said nothing.

We boarded our ship. It was large, for what was basically a hot-air balloon; all ten of us could have stretched out across the floor of the ‘basket’ without touching. In contrast to usual iskoort aesthetics, there was a safety rail. It was a thin, fragile-looking bar of metal that sat where the sides of the basket would be in a human-built hot-air balloon.

Perhaps ‘platform’ was a better term than ‘basket’.

“I’m not so sure this is a great decision,” David remarked as we all stepped carefully onto the platform, which was completely flat except for the operator’s controls right in the middle. Pilot and Guide showed no nervousness whatsoever as they settled onboard.

We set off. We drifted out over the open expanse between cities. At our request, Pilot brought us lower; low enough to actually see the ground between the cities, which was somehow more unsettling than when we couldn’t.

“Okay,” Jake said. “Hold us here for awhile, Pilot. Everyone, time to morph.”

We did.

Two huge eagles. Four hork-bajir and one howler, nervously holding guns we’d bought before leaving to shoot down approaching howlers if we had the chance. One android, still slightly melted from his last face-off with the howlers, and two trader iskoort, the only ones among us who weren’t at all tense.

We sat.

And we waited.


	16. Chapter 16

<Anything yet, Jake?> Tobias asked.

<No,> Jake said. <Well, they… ah, yes, I see where they are. They’re too far away for me to tell if they’re running about very much or anything.>

<They will be,> Rachel said grimly. <As soon as they realise where we are, they’ll come.>

I tightened my grip on my gun. It was similar, although not identical, to a Dracon beam. It didn’t look too hard to use. Point and click, right?

<Okay,> Jake said. <Same stuff as last time… factory… some training games… oh, man, that’s disgusting.>

<Anything of military importance?> asked Ax.

<Not that I can tell. Nothing here they’d have any reason to hide. God, that’s… ew. Nobody should ever do that to a spine.>

<They’ll be doing whatever it is to our spines if we can’t hurry this,> David said.

<Oh yes, hurry the speed at which memories reach my brain. I’ll get right on that. Oop, here they come. They’re moving up through the city, towards the aircraft docks.>

I checked my gun for the tenth time. Erek was staring hard at the city we’d come from. Soon, I spotted what he was looking at. Little dark specks, flying through the sky.

Coming closer.

<We have incoming,> David reported. His talons squeezed the safety rail, like he was imagining it was a howler’s head.

Soon, they were visible to my hork-bajir eyes. I raised my gun.

And my arm wavered. I couldn’t shoot! It was obvious why – the howlers weren’t alone. Each was on a little motorised glider, like the one Guide had come for me on, and each had an iskoort pilot. There was no way I could hit a howler without risking the pilot. No way. The greatest marksman in the world couldn’t do it.

Of course, they couldn’t shoot at us, for similar reasons. Erek made sure they were close enough to get a good look at Guide and Pilot, then raised a hologram of a whole crowd of iskoort. From the inside, through the shimmer of the hologram, we saw the six howlers holster weapons and shout commands to their pilots.

The gliders moved to circle our balloon.

<I’ve played this computer game before,> Marco said. <We just have to push each one off as it jumps onboard. Easy-peasy.>

We hork-bajir got ready for the howlers to jump. The eagles took to the air, keeping close enough to the balloon to avoid being shot, ready to dive. The iskoort stared, enraptured, creating valuable memories for later sale. The howler nearest to me leapt. It grabbed the edge of the platform with both of its main hands. I readied myself to kick its head when it tried to pull itself up.

It swung itself under the platform, and began scuttling underneath it.

I’d forgotten that they could do that.

“Jake, what are they doing?” Erek asked.

“I don’t know! I haven’t seen any memories of this strategy yet, it’s… it’s a slow process...”

The floor beneath my feet grew hot. A thin line started to melt.

<They’re cutting through the platform!> I yelled. <Why are they…?>

<They know where Pilot and Guide are!> Ax said urgently. <They are leaving the pilot section intact while cutting away enough that the rest of us will not fit.>

<On it,> Rachel said, as she and David dove under the platform. From beneath us, chaotic fletchette and beam weapon fire. <We can’t get them!> Rachel said, frustrated. <They’re hugging the platform too closely!>

<Jake, close your eyes!> Marco said urgently. <They can see your memories! That’s how they can tell where we all are!>

Jake closed his eyes. “It’s no good!” he said. “This morph has way too many senses! Aaargh, what – ?!”

<What is it?> I asked him, while Rachel yelled at Pilot to find somewhere, anywhere, to land.

<Nothing,> he told me privately. <Crayak’s in here. It startled me. He was really, really insistent that none of us get into these memories, but I’m not sure what it is he doesn’t want us to see.>

The pilots who had taken the howlers over were circling our balloon in their gliders, watching the fight. On top of the platform, little was visible from their vantage point except for a hologram of some iskoort milling about. But below, a lot of drama was happening. So the gliders were all circling below the platform.

<Guys,> I said, pointing. <I see our way out!>

Hork-bajir are experts at moving very quickly through the uneven terrain of wind-blown branches, high off the ground. It wasn’t much of a challenge to note the path of a glider and time my jump.

I landed on the nonsensical collection of poles and canvas and the whole assembly shuddered. For a second, I thought it was all going to fold in over me and crush me to death… but it held.

Around me, other hork-bajir were jumping onto other gliders. Then, Jake. The eyes of the howlers clinging to the platform all followed him.

<Erek?> I asked.

Erek’s iskoort hologram was briefly replaced by a giant green thumbs-up. I took that to mean he would be okay. He was probably sticking close to Pilot and Guide.

I crawled along the top of my glider and stuck my head over the edge, meeting the pilot’s gaze. “Hey!” I said in Jara’s gruff hork-bajir voice. “You want to see this fight get even more dramatic?”

The pilot nodded, staring.

“Get us down to the ground!” I told him.

We dropped. If I’d been human, I would have fallen off, but shifting poles are no problem for a hork-bajir. The others, apparently taking their cue from me, dropped.

A howler landed on the glider next to me. I recognised it; it was blind, and had one missing hand. It growled at me.

I dropped between the poles, hoping they wouldn’t crush me, and sat behind the pilot, then promptly began to demorph.

The howler pointed its sightless eyes towards me. It knew basically where I was, and it could probably guess that I was changing shape, but could it accurately distinguish my position from the pilot’s? Could it reach me, and kill me, without harming the pilot or destroying the glider?

It snarled in frustration.

<Is there a plan for this part?> Rachel asked.

<Not really,> I said. <Just keep them off Jake until he can learn whatever it is we’re not supposed to know. The ground cover is razor-sharp, by the way.>

<It’s what now?>

I didn’t bother answering. I was already concentrating on the one morph that I knew could move easily along the ground without being cut.

Morphing a tender isk wasn’t that different to morphing a trader, at least at first. Same general body shape, although the tenders had stalk eyes and walked on their toes and hand, only resting back on their absurdly long feet to rear up, kind of like a housecat. I could see how they were based off the same design. The tender isk was probably one of the first types engineered, I figured; the body design seemed to fit its purposes a lot better. I could see how maybe the yoort had started with bodies engineered to tend their pools and the grasses covering them, and then branched out into other specialities as the needs arose.

It was certainly easier to move about as a tender isk. I leapt out of the glider as it dipped low towards the ground. The pilot skimmed the very top of the grasses, then rolled the glider, dropping the howler almost on top of me. But down there, in the grass, I knew exactly where I was.

I could feel the pool around my hands and toes, liquid a little thicker than ideal, probably from evaporation. A couple of yoort brushed against my legs, fast and strong; probably healthy. I automatically drove my central fingers into the mud, checking aeration and consistency. Consciously, I had no idea what the best consistency was, or what its composition should be, any more than a little kid enjoying a lollipop understands the high energy value of the sugar they’re eating. I just knew that the mud was good.

I knew that the grass was straight, its density comfortable. I couldn’t really see over it without rearing right up onto my legs, but I didn’t need to. I could see, in deformations in the pattern of the grass, that something was wrong – several heavy objects had fallen from the sky. No, they were moving – several heavy people had fallen from the sky. I could feel where they were, and I could feel where my brother tenders were, their diaphragms humming on some subsonic frequency that carried through the grass. They would feel me, too, and they would feel the intruders.

The intruders were interfering with the pool and the grass. This was a very, very bad thing. The damage made me feel a little ill.

The one closest to me was standing up. The howler. I dashed away, barely rippling the grass as I moved. The howler was faster than me. But the grass cut at its legs; not badly, just enough to chafe. In the long run, it would probably do real damage. Slow it down.

If I could make sure there _was_ a long run.

The air above me was full of birds and gliders. The ground around me was covered in howlers. Seven howlers.

<Jake, you okay?> I asked.

<Yeah, I think. What is this stuff? I’m suffering the Death of a Thousand Cuts down here.>

Seven howlers. Where was Jake, where was the enemy? Did the other howlers have some way to tell who was who? I needed to find him before they did.

<Ax,> Jake said, <how long have I been in morph?>

<Fifty one of your Earth minutes, Prince Jake.>

<Feels like way longer.>

<Jake,> I said, <wherever you are, jump up and down three times.>

I held still. I listened.

I felt one of the howlers impact the muddy ground three times.

Gotcha!

I dashed for Jake. Now that I knew which one he was, the pattern was clear – the other howlers were trying to surround him. I dashed over to him, moving silently through the tightening ring of enemies.

<Hi, Jake. Get on my back.>

<Cassie? I’m faster than you. Go, get to safety.>

<They want you, not me!> I had no time to argue; I ducked under his legs. <When they catch up, you can keep running, and they’ll be far more cut up by the grass than you. I can move between it!>

I could feel the howlers. I could feel my brother tender iskoort approaching. Above, Marco asked, <Any idea what memory we’re looking for yet, Jake?>

<I don’t know! I don’t know what we’re supposed to do!>

I saw an opening. I ran.

I could feel the cities, the large expanses where the grass and pool didn’t exist. I tried to head for the nearest one. Jake knelt on my back, keeping his legs clear of the razor grass while I moved effortlessly through it. Howler! I dodged, but it was too quick! Jake slashed out with his claws; claw met claw, and we passed by, both sides unharmed.

They were herding, hunting, like wolves. To where?

The base of the city, up ahead! High metal, rising as high as the grass. Last time I’d had to get up there, several tender isk had worked together to help me; I wasn’t sure how to get Jake up there alone.

I ran alongside the metal base. Ahead of me, a hand – Erek! Jake leapt up, grabbed the hand, used his howler climbing abilities to scamper up while Erek reached for me. A cloud of Earth birds zoomed in around us.

“What’s the plan?” Erek asked as I collapsed in a heap of uncoordinated limbs; the tender isk was lost and clumsy on flat metal.

<Still keeping Jake alive,> David said.

“Oh, well so long as we’re consistent,” Erek said.

It was then that I realised why the howlers had let us make it to the city. The flat, open expanse was somewhere they could move freely, and we had nowhere to hide. We’d moved out of my ideal environment and into theirs. Idiot!

I had to demorph. Remorph. There wouldn’t be enough time.

<Higher!> Tobias yelled. <More cover!>

Jake dashed for the stairs. Birds wheeled above the howlers, trying to slow them down. Erek picked me up and bolted after Jake.

What were we supposed to see in those memories? What did Crayak want concealed from us? Was it something Jake had already seen and just didn’t recognise? Was he just too distracted, fighting for his life, to properly remember anything? Was the whole thing a big red herring, in the hope we’d do something like this and get ourselves killed in a stupid way?

The next level up was residential, as I expected, but it wasn’t bright white with neon, all clean for the tourists. Metal and canvas shacks stood everywhere, apparently built out of whatever had been lying around. Cover! Jake ran for cover.

Wouldn’t work. I already knew it wouldn’t work. They could see memories, too, right? Just like he could see theirs. And they could tell where he was, as easily as he could tell where they were. Howlers spread out. They didn’t go for the kill right away. They went to surround him, once again, like wolves.

No, not like wolves. Wolves hunt in packs to take down prey larger than them. They didn’t need all six howlers for Jake. But all six were still focusing on Jake. Walking right past me and Erek. Not even looking at the birds unless they chose to strike.

Like cats, all intent on the same laser dot on the wall.

I looked up at Erek, who was glancing around, clearly deciding where to put a hologram, how he could block any of the howlers. The destroyers of his people. His targets, mandated by his god.

But the howlers should know the path Jake had taken, hologram or not. They should be able to see it in his memories.

Jake remembering theirs… them remembering his…

Ellimist had told Erek that he had the tools to win, and then sent him to Iskoort without the ability to commit violence, but with us.

Ellimist had told him that _before any of the Animorphs had agreed to go_. He hadn’t said that we had the tools. He’d said that Erek did.

It was a war of ideals, Erek had said. And what had we been doing since then? Adopting Crayak’s ideals. Ellimist had built a race from his ideals, a race of joy and peace who existed to spread life throughout the galaxy, and Crayak had copied the idea into a twisted reflection of his own ideals to kill them. Ellimist had sent us as his champions in a rematch, with one of the children of his ideal race… and were weren’t fighting with his philosophy. We were fighting with Crayak’s. Of course we were going to lose that fight.

Erek had the tools. What did the chee have? Invisibility. Peace. Dogs. And something living in sensory isolation in his head, something we wouldn’t have to use like the ellimist had probably planned for him to, because we had a better way… we had Jake...

Erek, throwing a stick, laughing, wrestling with Homer in the dirt…

Howlers were children, Jake had said; they didn’t understand what they were doing…

<We got it backwards, Jake!> I told him. <Crayak doesn’t care what you see in their memories, he – >

<Yes, I understand,> Jake said. <Can you help?>

<I think Erek can. Erek, you’re the expert here – we need you to do what you were built to do!>

“What? What’s going on?”

Jake and I answered together.

<Play!>


	17. Chapter 17

The logic was simple.

Howlers loved to play. But they only knew one ‘game’ – cat and mouse, where the mice always lost. They had no understanding that their prey had lives and loves, that there were people like them who were hurt and killed. They probably had no real understanding of death. They had, if Tobias and Ax were correct, no memory of defeat.

But we, our little ragtag band of primitives, had killed two of them. So it made no sense that they were never defeated.

Jake knew death and defeat. Jake knew despair and hatred and pain. But Jake knew more ways to have fun, to celebrate life, to bond with people, than just to go out killing together. All he had to do was make the howlers remember that. Make the howlers dig through Jake’s memories. That’s what Crayak wanted to avoid – corrupting his precious soldiers with concepts like empathy.

And so hurriedly, before the howlers could properly corner and kill Jake, we built a game. Or more accurately, Erek built a game. Me, I was busy demorphing as quickly as I could.

“I need time to recalibrate some systems,” Erek said. “You need to distract them with playful morphs. Whatever you have that Jake will have positive memories of, but the howlers won’t know how to handle.”

<David and I have dogs,> Marco said.

“Good. Perfect.”

What did I have? Dolphins, but no water. Horses? I wasn’t sure if Jake knew how joyful horses could be. Something… no, it didn’t have to be animals, did it?

Erek was planting himself between a pair of howlers and Jake. He wouldn’t hold them for long, but it was enough time for Jake to duck out of his corner, leap up and grab the ceiling. One of the howlers drew a gun. Erek calmly crushed the tip of it in his hand. The howler pulled out a sticky explosive, and Erek dodged out of the way.

I was half-demorphed. Before my thought-speak went I said, <Erek, show them a cinnamon bun! Just trust me on this!>

Erek didn’t hesitate. A cinnamon bun appeared in his hand. He raised it like a weapon; howlers backed away cautiously. They’d be wondering what it was, searching Jake’s memories of such objects, Jake’s feelings during those memories…

Was that huffing sound the howler equivalent of a chuckle?

I was human, but I had no idea what to morph next. What morph did I have that could communicate emotion best, specifically through Jake’s eyes?

A dog and a puppy yapped at one howler’s feet. Another was being hissed at by a cat – Rachel. The howler raised a clawed hand to strike.

The world around us changed.

Buildings were now jutting halfway through plain, red walls. The walls were slightly see-through, and kept flickering in and out of existence. I touched one; they were solid, at least when they were in existence. They stretched from floor to ceiling. A maze.

“Erek?” I asked.

“This is really difficult to maintain,” he grunted. “My emitters will drain power very quickly at this range. It won’t last long, but...”

But I recognised it. I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid, but I knew every twist and turn. It was a maze that used to be in The Gardens, in a small children’s entertainment section where parents could leave their kids while they went for coffee. Of course Jake had played in it. Every kid in my hometown had. It had been The Place to take kids on a slow afternoon when they were being difficult.

A place where children made games.

The real version didn’t have bits of people’s houses sticking through it, but the simulation should still be usable. I ran through the corridors. They were bigger than in real life, of course; they were scaled up, so they were about the same comparative size to us as they had been when we were kids.

I ran through the maze, hit by my own waves of nostalgia. This had been a safe place, before the war, before trouble. There was no need to morph in a place like this. There was no need to fight in a place like this, not over anything more important than who got more ice cream.

A howler stood in front of me. Not Jake. I was blocking its path.

It leapt over me, and kept running. I followed it – it would know where Jake was, it was still going for him, I had to slow it down, force it to remember, force it to –

The maze vanished. I saw Jake. He was being held down on his knees by two howlers. As I watched, a third strolled up. It was the blind, one-handed one, the one we’d done real damage to. It had no problem locating Jake. Jake struggled, but couldn’t move; he turned his head to look at me, bright robin’s-egg-blue eyes searching my face as if trying to remember every detail. I tried to smile for him, remembering the feel of his lips on mine. The howler raised its remaining clawed hand above its head and brought it down, sharply, straight at Jake’s face.

It tapped his forehead with two fingers.

“Tag,” it said.

I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

And on the birthday cake in front of me, six of the fifteen candles blew out.


	18. Chapter 18

My parents were cheering. My friends, looking startled and disoriented, hurriedly took up the cheer.

I looked around. Where was I? Home? But… but I was…

At my birthday party. Definitely. I was wearing the same clothes I had been when we’d left, standing in the same position. I tried to gather my thoughts and bring myself back to the present, hoping my parents weren’t noticing anything weird.

“You want to make the first cut, honey?” Dad asked, handing me a knife. I stared at it, having momentarily forgotten what it was for.

“Make sure you don’t touch the bottom, or you have to kiss the nearest boy,” Mom smiled.

I half-heartedly stuck the blade into the cake, then let go. I looked around at my friends, all trying to get a grip on the situation. My mother took over the cutting. Had we won, then? Had it worked? It must have. And everyone was here, everyone…

Except Erek, who was walking towards the forest at a startling pace.

“I’ll be right back, Mom,” I said. “I have to… check… a thing...”

I jogged off after Erek.

So did the entire birthday party.

Erek halted at the edge of the forest. By the time we caught up to him, we saw why.

Amidst the trees, just barely hidden by them, was a pemalite. I didn’t know how pemalite sexes worked, but if I had to guess based on human aesthetics, I’d say that she was probably female. She was a head taller than Erek, with pale white fur that sparkled at the ends, as if tipped with frost. He walked toward her as if hypnotised, and when she turned to smile at him, I saw that her eyes were full of stars.

“My grandchild,” Ellimist said lovingly.

She dropped to all fours to take two fluid, bounding leaps towards Erek, then stood back up and placed her paw-hands on his shoulders. “Do you understand?” she asked.

“Yes,” Erek said. “I understand.”

“And now, will you take what you have witnessed to your people? Will you earn your title all over again, Memitor?”

“Yes. I will.”

She put one hand to his forehead. “And do you still want what we agreed?”

“No,” he said. “No, that… wouldn’t be a prudent course of action.”

She cocked her head, looking for a moment exactly like a confused dog.

“I mean,” Erek explained, “that whether I remember what happened with the pemalite crystal or not, whether my fellow chee remember, it still happened. I still did those things. Those people are still dead. The memory is uncomfortable, the reputation is uncomfortable, but if I don’t have it, then what we just did makes a whole lot less sense. And what we just did… has value. Besides, someday, the choice of violence might come up again. If I don’t remember… how will I know not to make the same mistake again? More people could get hurt.”

Ellimist laughed. “Perhaps the pemalites made a misjudgement in programming these sorts of limitations into you at all,” she said. “You seem to be doing just fine figuring them out on your own. So what do you want, Memitor?”

“I owe Guide, grub of Skin-Seller quite a lot of memory data,” he said. “I can’t pay the bill on my own at this range.”

“It is done.” She glanced over Erek’s shoulder, making a show of pretending to notice us for the first time. For a brief moment, she radiated pure joy. “And you brought your friends!” She moved past Erek (who did look surprised to see us) and, with a motion halfway between taking off a coat and putting a new one on, there was suddenly no pemalite in front of us, but a blue-skinned old man.

“Well,” he said. “You saved a planet.” He bowed. “You have my thanks.”

Marco opened his mouth to make a smart remark, then closed it again. (Marco didn’t deliberately provoked beings who could erase his existence and ancestry for a hundred generations in the blink of an eye, unless he was _really_ mad.)

“So we won?” Jake asked.

“You won. Iskoort is safe. Its inhabitants will live.”

“I still don’t understand what just happened,” Rachel said. “You were pretty clear that we’d have to kill them. We didn’t kill them.”

I shook my head. “We didn’t have to kill them. We had to outlive them.”

Jake nodded. “We didn’t kill them; Crayak did. We gave him no choice.”

“Why?” Rachel asked, baffled.

“Collective memory,” Jake explained. “Like I said, they were children playing. They only knew one game; to kill, to keep killing. Like superintelligent cats with mice. But put the feelings and memories of the mouse in the cat’s head as it hunts… he couldn’t let that spread to his armies. Without their innocent evil, they’re useless to him. He had to destroy the infection, before any off-planet howlers could go digging around and find the wrong memories.”

I nodded. “Tobias and Ax said they were undefeated. But we took two of them down, right? So in some of those amazing, advanced planets they’d fought, somebody must have taken them down. Why did they believe themselves undefeated? Crayak had to be keeping the collective memory... pure. Pruning.”

“So we taught them empathy, and got them killed right away?” Rachel looked sick.

“Somebody gave us very little choice when it came to mercy,” I said, glaring at Ellimist.

He shrugged. “I explained the terms very clearly. You agreed to them. Have you changed your mind about whether the safety of an entire planet was worth it?”

Jake was watching Ellimist, looking thoughtful. “This isn’t the whole game.”

Ellimist cocked his head. “You think that the game is bigger than one planet? That perhaps you have achieved more?”

“What are you guys talking about?” Rachel grumbled.

“Tell us,” Jake said.

Ellimist shrugged. “Why do you assume that I have more information on that than you do? They’re your memories.”

Jake was already morphing. He grew, his face melted into a new shape, his skin darkened and cracked. Once he was a howler, he closed his eyes and stood motionless for a while, concentrating. Nobody interrupted him.

“Does Crayak know?” Jake said finally.

“Crayak doesn’t know the future for certain, either,” Ellimist said, his smile growing smug. “He probably has no reason to suspect that in six days, when a team of howlers land on Zanastra and make first contact with the singing flowertenders who live there, instead of trying to kill them, they might very well...”

“Kiss them,” Jake finished.

“How much got through?” Ellimist asked.

“Enough, I think. This wasn’t about Iskoort at all, was it?”

“Of course this was about Iskoort. I think the question you want to ask is, ‘Was saving Iskoort the only possible positive outcome?’ And you have your answer to that.”

“Crayak’s lost his shock troops,” Jake said.

David laughed. “Guys! We rule! Do you understand what this means? We _totally just wiped out the howlers_! A race of world-destroying monsters leaving nothing but destruction in their wake; they mess with the Animorphs? Boom! Gone!”

I shook my head. “They’re not wiped – Oh. They are, aren’t they? There’s no reason for Crayak to keep them around after this. He’s going to kill them.”

“Good,” Erek said with satisfaction.

“No,” I said. “Not good.” I glared at Ellimist. “You have to save them.”

“After everything they’ve done?!” Erek exclaimed. “All those planets, all those lives – ”

“Are you telling me that people shouldn’t have an opportunity to learn from their mistakes, _Memitor_?” I snapped back. He paused in his shock, and I turned back to Ellimist. “Listen. You’ve come to us three times for help, that I know about. I don’t for one second think this is the last time we’re going to meet. Now, I get the whole different wars on different levels kind of thing; I don’t mind playing your pawn if it’s for a good cause. But you came to us for help. You said you were trying to be humble. So I expect my ideals to be treated with respect. You do not get to trick us into genocide, understand? I won’t be that kind of pawn. I won’t bat for a team who plays those kinds of games. You are going to save the howlers. This is not up for negotiation, and I don’t care what concessions you have to make to do it. We’re not having this kind of precedent in our relationship. If you refuse, our relationship is over. Done. I’ll pre-emptively vote against helping you or dealing with you in any mission from now on, no matter the stakes, no matter the reward you promise.”

Rachel nodded, crossing her arms. “I’m getting kind of sick of being pushed around by all these cosmic mind games,” she said. “I’m with Cassie. You don’t trick us into wiping out a species like that. Save them, or we’re done.”

<I will not allow you to trick this team as you have tricked so many andalites,> Ax agreed. <I, too, will refuse any further work with you if this is how you intend to behave.>

“That’s three ‘no’s on any future mission,” Jake said, sounding amused. “Four would be a majority.”

“Then we have a majority,” David said. “I don’t care about howlers. But I’m sick of being jerked around.”

Ellimist glanced at Jake, who held his hands up, helplessly, suppressing a smirk. “It’s out of my hands,” he said. “We always vote.”

Ellimist looked perplexed for a moment. Then, he suddenly smiled. “Well, it would hardly make a very uplifting end to the story otherwise, would it?” he asked. “Do you understand what you are demanding of me? Do you even know if howlers will be able to create new generations, and live on once their creators have abandoned them? How do you know the species won’t die out once the current generation dies, anyway?”

I glanced at Erek. “Not a relevant question. These howlers, here and now, deserve to make their own destinies.”

“Well, far be it for me to dare refuse the Animorphs. The howlers will live. I do hope you survive long enough for us to meet again and make this deal worth it.”

And with that, he was gone.

“I think I like it more when he’s being all awe-inspiring,” Marco said thoughtfully. “He’s kind of creepy when he’s trying to be jovial.”

David burst into laughter. “Did we basically just tell a god to go screw himself, and he did?”

“He’s not a god,” I snapped. Erek cleared his throat meaningfully. “Not our god,” I amended. “Anyway. I think we have something way more important to do right now that sit under these trees and ponder the meaning of divinity, the value of life and the importance of redemption.”

“What’s that?” Tobias asked.

I nodded at Ax, whose eyes widened. “Eat cake!” he exclaimed.

And so we all ran back to the party. To eat cake with friends.


End file.
